Random Thoughts... [Automotive Edition]

Insurance, not registration.
Reading is hard...
What could possibly go wrong with a non-running E32 V12 7er with unknown mileage for about $1k? A new starter is only $150 + shipping on Rockauto. Clearly that will fix all the issues.
If you gonna have an old BMW V12 money pit might as well get the 8er
 
If you gonna have an old BMW V12 money pit might as well get the 8er

Except the point is that this is for sale right now. Find me an 8er in that good cosmetic condition for under $1500 (and likely bargainable to under $1000). I'm not going to go look at it myself, but if I can convince my buddy to waste his Saturday afternoon with me, then maybe.
 
There are worse ways of spending $1500
Also, if everything goes to shit, part out the car and make a coffee table out of the V12?
 
There are worse ways of spending $1500
Also, if everything goes to shit, part out the car and make a coffee table out of the V12?
Hell, the wheels and interior are probably worth what you paid for it, the body work, headlights, and other bits will be worth a mint if you don't mind waiting for the right buyer.
 
WTF? How is registration so expensive in MA? Even in soviet New Yorkistan it’s under $200, with no relation to how much car is worth.
Insurance, not registration.
Yeah it's the insurance. I admittedly have it bare bones down to covering damage I may do in an at fault accident (like the car is worth maybe 1-2k on paper at best, most repair estimates will total it)
but 600$ (for the full year) is pretty damn cheap for MA. And that's even BEFORE you account for the "scratched a lexus" surcharge (like seriously it apparently costs like 2-3k to repaint a fucking bumper so it went through as a major accident I am so mad). $600 a year is a bargin to keep it as a second car and on the road.

I think the most hilarious part of this is thanks to it only being owned by two cripple who spent most of their time bedridden, a couple decades from now if I continue keep it in good condition might turn into a valuable classic car. Despite it's flaws I really feel grateful it was my first car. It's problems have taught me good lessons and largely has awarded me for getting attached to it.

Stop Tech brakes, stainless steel braided brake hoses, upgraded suspension so you can take corners like a pro.
Yes this sounds good I was thinking similarly. Once you manage to get it up to speed it's fun to throw it around. Best "oh shit" handles I've ever seen in a car.

.... i wonder if I can install something similar to beetle door handles in the fiat tbh. It lets you brace your entire forearm against the door.
 
They probably added some damage to cover deductible
Nope they listed the damage on the thing and it was all the bumper scratch. I mean they might have just done what doctors do and falsely inflate the price but it didn't seem to be made up damage.

Really damn gross if so though like the bug was in awful fucking shape at that crash so the guy would have to have been like "I, someone who can afford a fairly new lexus, find this 500$ charge unreasonable, so I will cost this poor person whose car is probably totalled and in need of replacement a surcharge."

Hey guess what I was forced to pay the first year after that crash? Three thosand five hundred dollars.

The bug is worth maybe half that. My insurance before the crash was under 1k. I am extremely lucky in that I have savings to cushion me. For a lot of people I know that would be full on life destroying. They could no longer afford to insure a car and therefore would lose their transportation/job.
 
First of all, I can see that paintjob being very expensive - metallic paint is expensive, there are all sorts of sensors and lights to dis/re connect, which adds labor time, and I'm sure the dealer's labor rates are high. Maybe some of those sensors had to be replaced, I don't know.

Second, I'm not sure why you're seemingly assuming that there is a scam going on. Do you have any evidence whatsoever to back up that claim of illegal activity?

Third, a major accident is one where there's over $5k in damage. It might have been lower several years ago, I don't remember, but either way $500 probably isn't what broke the camel's back. Besides, we don't even know if his deductible was actually $500, do we?

Fourth, why should the Lexus owner take pity on you? You hit him, it's completely your fault. I'll give you a very similar and personal example: my wife's Jeep got rear-ended by an old Civic last month - I'm not taking pity on the other driver because he was inattentive enough to hit a stationary vehicle and I'm not going to risk having trouble turning this lease in due to damage.
 
Nope they listed the damage on the thing and it was all the bumper scratch. I mean they might have just done what doctors do and falsely inflate the price but it didn't seem to be made up damage.


This incident that I saw the aftermath of had the car suffer "a scratch" and a couple of popped clips. Aside from the bumper cover sticking out proud of the fender on the driver's side by about 2mm, this was the only other visible damage. "A scratch" or two as it were.



This is the final estimate that became the bill for that "scratch".



These are far cheaper prices than a Lexus dealer would charge for parts and the body repair work (assuming the dealership has a bodyshop). These repairs were carried out at a Hyundai-certified independent body repair facility associated with but not owned by the local Hyundai dealer, so the prices were cheaper than the other local dealer's in-house bodyshop.

Just "scratching" a modern car is far more expensive to repair than you seem to think.

Really damn gross if so though like the bug was in awful fucking shape at that crash so the guy would have to have been like "I, someone who can afford a fairly new lexus, find this 500$ charge unreasonable, so I will cost this poor person whose car is probably totalled and in need of replacement a surcharge."

Why is that supposed to be their responsibility when it was your responsibility to not hit them in the first place? Further, you have no idea of their financial status. For all you know, that could have been a company car that was issued to him and he couldn't have actually afforded the car. Or he could have had significant money at the time he purchased it, but now he's got a wife suffering from cancer while having to pay for round the clock child care/college/other huge nasty family expenses that aren't immediately obvious. FFS, I was T-boned/clipped in my XJ6 of the time (not the one I have now) during one of the absolute worst business years I've ever had - to the point where for a couple months I was buying ramen in bulk so I had enough money to feed my (furry) cat. But I've got a nice looking Jaguar, so that automatically means I had enough money to let the miscreant who hit me not pay for what damage they did, right? :mad: Hint: It doesn't.

Hey guess what I was forced to pay the first year after that crash? Three thosand five hundred dollars. The bug is worth maybe half that. My insurance before the crash was under 1k.

That is not how car liability insurance works, or how the liability part of comprehensive car insurance works. The price you pay for liability insurance does not take into account the replacement value of your car. It is calculated based on how likely you are to do damage to other people's cars and property, and how much that damage is likely to cost when you hit them. When you hit the Lexus, you told the insurance company that you are an inattentive driver who likes running into stationary objects that cost significant amounts of money to repair and therefore are high-risk; your premium was adjusted accordingly. You could be driving a car that was free to replace because the manufacturer was giving them away and it still wouldn't affect your liability rate.

Rear ending someone on the street is actually one of the 'minor accidents' that will jack your insurance rates up a seemingly disproportionate rate here in the US, because it is (usually correctly) assumed that the person doing the rear-ending was at fault unless it can be proven otherwise (good luck with that). It is further assumed, again usually correctly, that this was due to inattention and that the accident was correspondingly completely preventable. This is hard to disprove, which is why the swoop and squat scam has been a perennial favorite and in turn is why dash cams are becoming wildly popular these days - they're the reliable only way to prove you weren't being an idiot and should not be at fault, if that indeed is the case.
 
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Hey guess what I was forced to pay the first year after that crash? Three thosand five hundred dollars.

What the FUCK?
 
You can thank auto makers for this one, they lobbied heavily to reduce the damage threshold of bumpers from 5 mph to 2.5 mph. My first car had bumpers like these:

ZZsYi0O.jpg


You could push these bumpers in all the way to the bodywork, the "repair" was to loosen a couple of bolts and pull it back into place or wait for the gas pistons to push it back out over a couple of weeks.
 
You can thank auto makers for this one, they lobbied heavily to reduce the damage threshold of bumpers from 5 mph to 2.5 mph. My first car had bumpers like these:

ZZsYi0O.jpg


You could push these bumpers in all the way to the bodywork, the "repair" was to loosen a couple of bolts and pull it back into place or wait for the gas pistons to push it back out over a couple of weeks.
It also didn’t have airbag sensors, parking sensors, outside temp sensors, cameras and all that extraneous bs cars have these days
 
My Xterra has off road steel bumpers and it has airbag sensors - they just are not bumper-mounted. Cameras usually aren't in the bumper anyway, they get mounted to the grill, mirrors, or rear hatch/trunk lid. I've also never seen an outside temp sensor on the bumper - about the only part that I see on the bumper cover is the parking sensor.
 
What the FUCK?

Due to a streak of idiot collisions caused by negligence, aggression and stupidity combined with lawn-darting vehicles, my dad's car insurance bill actually went over $12K/year for a while IIRC. :rolleyes:

My Xterra has off road steel bumpers and it has airbag sensors - they just are not bumper-mounted. Cameras usually aren't in the bumper anyway, they get mounted to the grill, mirrors, or rear hatch/trunk lid. I've also never seen an outside temp sensor on the bumper - about the only part that I see on the bumper cover is the parking sensor.

Yes, but cameras and sensors are often flush or near flush with the bumper and get damaged at the same time. Go look at that bill I posted upthread for the damaged Hyundai Genesis Sedan - "scratched" the bumper skin at the reinforcement bar level but even so they had to replace a parking sensor and the smart cruise control forward transceiver module plus the grille surround. The list of parts they had to replace, repair and refinish is on there.

Some cars also carry their ambient temp sensors directly behind the bumper skin - my 4Runner carries it behind the stamped bumper, so if you actually damage the bumper, the sensor gets destroyed. The 4Runner also has an internal accelerometer for the airbags like your XTerra, but there are plenty of cars out there that mount the sensors to the bumper skins themselves today. For example, the 370Z mounts three airbag sensors in the bumper/nosecone:
Amuse1.jpg
 
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Well that's just lazy shit-tier engineering. There's no reason that airbag sensors need to be mounted on the bumper cover.

It's times like this that I love my gives-no-fucks beater.
 
Well that's just lazy shit-tier engineering. There's no reason that airbag sensors need to be mounted on the bumper cover.

It's times like this that I love my gives-no-fucks beater.

There are actually good engineering reasons for putting those there - on cars. Centralized accelerometers or inertial sensors like you have on the X and I have on the 4R often have issues working in shorter vehicles with lower centers of gravity. Not that it hasn't been done, but it adds expense.

What's inexcusable is the stupid exposed location they put the airbag deployment sensors on on the GMT900s. They're bolted to the bottom side of the lower radiator core support. Which means that they're relatively close to the ground and in many impacts, the sensors don't trip because the incoming force goes over them, and is why you can see more than a few GMT900s in the local junkyards with significant front end damage but the airbags didn't go off. You can also pop the airbags by tapping that crossmember with a rock going offroad...
 
Also another thing not mentioned is if a car has adaptive cruise control with the radar hidden behind plastic, the paint procedure in that are typically is much more strenuous on the shop as the tolerance for paint thickness is a lot more tightly controlled. That said, generally I don't see ACC radars hidden behind fascias much anymore, they usually have their own dedicated openings and cover. For example, on the Raptor, the ACC radar is hidden behind the driver's side bumper cover just off the side of the lower cooler opening.

OZVp6D0.png


One would just replace that whole piece if it was damaged, and that alone is $220. And thats assuming the radar itself wasn't damage and the bracket wasn't bent.
 
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The crash in question was the car skidding when stopping in the rain. It was also due to the dying brakes, which I had just brought the car to the shop to have checked 2 weeks earlier.

If they intentionally inflated the repair costs, that's insurance fraud last I checked. Additionally, they waited so long to get the repairs estimated in that the appeal period ended so I could not fight the surcharge. This was my only at fault accident in 14 years of driving, a 15mph bump in a crash that failed to even dent the bumper on the bug. The damage did not go above the 500$ deductible so I had to pay for that myself. If you are doing that to obviously poor people you are in fact an asshole.

So YEAH I think a 2500$ dollar increase on my insurance was absolutely unreasonable, given if Ihad 0 insurance and paid out of pocket it would have been . So did all the other insurance companies thankfully, my quote from the first company was actually HIGHER then last year, the surcharge from the other companies is like 700$. This company for the record has forced me to fight 2 other surcharges in which case the other person was doing something illegal. The way the laws work in this state the insurance companies can basically charge whatever they want.

Like I am not saying I don't deserve a surcharge at all, I cannot prove i checked my brakes and was lied to. But if you look at "one at fault accident in a decade and a half and it was at like 20mph in the rain" and make the charge so high it would have been cheaper to pay out of pocket, that is absolutely bullshit.
On other topics, a friend just brought up a ClubLexus forum post about a guy who drained his tranny while trying to do an oil change, and that sent me down a nostalgia hunt......

https://www.tamparacing.com/forums/subaru-tech/455091-possible-blown-engine-need-urgent-help.html
https://www.audiforums.com/forum/off-topic-5/hey-guys-please-help-my-mods-gone-wrong-80267/


Good times on the Internet
Yeah the engine in the outback is mounted sideways? has a weird bean looking oil pain, and the tranny pan is exactly where you expect the oil pan to be. I and some other acutally smart people at shop class thought it was oil pan until the instructor corrected us.

Also the parts are like a clusterfuck sorting wise. I literally just came back from the damn dealer and paid the 25$ extra for the pan because I literally could not make sense of which things it needed. I thought i was an idiot until they needed 3 guys at the parts department to sort out which parts i needed.
 
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