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  • Way back in the before times of ~2012 or so, I had 2-door 2001 Chevy Tracker, the fun one with the soft-top. I loved that thing, the ability to drive top-down without having a big-ass jeep was exactly what I wanted.

    I had bought it from some lady who had owned it since new, and had just moved from the desert out West in the USA to the Northeast USA. The paint was absolutely nuked from ~10 years in the desert sun, there was barely any clear-coat left on it. The underside was spotless, though, no rust at all, which was unheard of for a car in the Northeast. It had some of those very 90's "swoosh" decals on the side.

    I was navigating through a parking lot, and some guy apparently decided it would be a good idea to zip right through between 2 parked cars to cut from one aisle to another, and bonked right into my passenger side door. It was a low-speed impact, no airbags, just a decent-sized, but aesthetic dent on the door. This was my first ever traffic incident, even though I'd been driving for a decade already, I had no idea what to do besides swap insurance info.

    A couple days later, I get a call from a body shop saying that I need to bring the car in to have it fixed. I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, nobody else had reached out to me, I didn't have any contact from the other guy's insurance, and I hadn't filed a claim, because I didn't care about the dent (there were already other dents on it from many years of regular use). Well, I was somewhat more young, and definitely naive, so I dropped it off where instructed, and didn't really get a lot of good information from the front desk guy at the shop. A week later, I get a call "We're having some trouble finding the decal on the side of the car, would it be ok if we just didn't replace it?"

    So it turns out that they had taken this beat up old thing with nuked paint, replaced the door with a door off a donor vehicle, re-painted the donor door perfect shiny brand new black, and then BLENDED this perfect shiny black into the fading scuffed original paint all around the door.

    I have no idea how much this cost, I never saw any paperwork, they just handed me the keys and I was off... I should have requested a pay-out lol. It honestly looked worse with the obviously mismatched door and the blended paint.

    Here's a before pic, I can't find any good ones that show the aftermath or even the original dent.

    I ended up accidentally running it out of oil summer of 2017 after some catastrophic computer thing cleared all the mileage data somehow and I forgot when the last oil change I did was... It lived for another 2 years with a little tick in the top end until one day it spun a bearing and was toast. If I wasn't a renter and had a garage and extra space I would have kept it and tried to fix it as a project car, it was just so much fun, but there were enough other things wrong with it that it just wasn't worth it with my limited resources. I ended up selling it with a spun bearing in 2019 for almost double what I originally bought it for in excellent condition in 2011 lol.

    I bought a brand new Subaru BRZ to replace it, and that's what I'm still driving now. Very different vibe. I miss the Tracker sometimes. I went from Forza Horizon 5 to a real-life version

  • Since I asked for car stories, I will come clean that the above text is a bit of a lie.

    The very first car I ever bought was straight from the lot, brand new, a pearly white Mazda 2 that I absolutely adored... For two weeks. To whoever cross in front of me at the stop light, apparently white isn't very visible, so I hit them going about 50mph/75kph and totaled my brand new car in one fell swoop. I was okay, though. A little sore and bruised, but I was just fine.

    My insurance offered me barely anything back, so I had to buckle down and save up for a few months. But I did get another Mazda 2 afterwards because I trusted the safety of the vehicle wholeheartedly. I just got a much brighter color that time.

  • I used to have a Jeep Liberty. It was an '06 and lasted me until '20 when I replaced it with something not made by Stellantis.

    Anyway, that car had a history of stuff breaking. I did a vast majority of the fixes myself, including random sensors here and there, the heater core, and even the head gasket (what a pain).

    I had to drive that car 3/4 across the country for work (with no cruise control), and knew I'd be keeping that car there for 6 months or so. Knowing something would probably break, I loaded most of my tools in the back while I was packing.

    Sure enough, about 3 days before I was supposed to drive it 24 hours back home, the water pump failed. I had a little bit of advance notice, but it took me a couple of days to diagnose what the noise was.

    I changed the water pump in the driveway of the house I was staying at, and had all of the tools I needed. It was both glorious and sucky at the same time.

  • Add some neon lights maybe? Glad to know you are ok.

    I totally busted my first car's catalytic converter because I didn't know how awful ethanol10% was. That's my story.