Word to the wise folks, if you’re carting home anything in your car that a sudden stop will turn into an Internet sensation then be sure to properly secure it. That advice is too late for this Seattle-area man and his dog, who ended up looking like a work by Jackson Pollock after their SUV hit an embankment on SR 302.
Don’t worry dog lovers, the pooch was fine, although also primed for adventure. Aside from his damaged ego, apparently so was the driver.
Image source: Imgur
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According to my cousin and her understanding husband something very similar happens if you forget a 12 pack of Pepsi in your car in the winter.
My sister left two cans of diet coke in the center console of my car this past winter.
I made her scrape every last chunk of ice off of the front seats and dashboard.
This poor little guy knows the feeling.
<img src="http://cl.jroo.me/z3/o/f/b/e/a.baa-Pretty-in-Pink-and-Sassy.jpg"width="500"/>
I dunno, he looks in the pink. 😉
A former coworker had something similar happen. He placed a can of white spray paint in the back seat of his Turbo New Beetle and slid the driver's seat back, puncturing the can (or something like that). White paint began spraying everywhere and in the amount of time it took to find the can and toss it outside, the entire interior was covered in white specks. His insurance company totalled the car, he bought back the salvage and proceeded to clean it up. I think he bought some new parts from salvage yards, but much of it he just cleaned.
Yet another example of overreacting by insurance companies … But did he manage to remove the smell? A friend of mine bought a smoker's car and his girl thought vinegar was good to remove that smell. Turned out it wasn't, it was just a stronger smell. He had to get it cleaned professionally, a very expensive process.
I'd rather smell piss or smoke or pretty much anything than a lingering vinegar smell.
Worst smell ever.
For the insurance company it's a simple financial calculation. If the cost to repair is more than a given percentage of the car's value it's not worth doing. In this case I suspect nearly the entire interior would need replacing to fix it properly, a quite expensive proposition. He was satisfied with the clean up, even though it took him months and wasn't 100%.
I never asked him about the smell, I suspect it must have went away.
Well, that also means cars are too cheap in the US. This is probably throwing a flare at a gas station, but when a base model Camry – a quite big, well-engineered, supposedly everlasting car – can be had for 23600$ I do wonder how this is possible. How do they earn money with this?
Well, Toyota makes nice profit with these "cheap" cars like Camry.
Thing with insurance companies is that they probably know well that dealership will smack extra margin to offers made to them , but what can they do, no insurance co. will spend time sourcing all the tiny bits for every case they have in their hands from junkyards.
Actually, a base Camry is even less, about $23K even with destination fees, but Toyota sells next to none of them. Of the 1,138 Camrys in inventory in my area exactly 12 of them are that base L model, or 1%. The LE is still pretty cheap, only a couple grand more, but the other trims are closer to $30K, on average and half the inventory is the SE model. The $23K base is for advertising, to get people in the door, but very few actually want one of those stripped down models.
Conversely, the average transaction price according to WSJ is over $31K and I bet that's close to the sweet spot for Camry sales too.
Nice, thanks for the research! Very understandable that hardly anyone wants the stripped down version, but it is still an incredible price for a big car with four wheels and an engine. Interesting that VW, GM and Ford are at roughly the same price point, and that incentives are close to 10%.
As a comparison: We don't have new Camry's in Norway anymore, but 23000$ buys me a well-kept 2002 2.4i modell. The smaller Avensis starts at 45000$.
So that would slot between our Camry & Corolla, right? I've often marveled at the rpices on some cars in other countries. I have no idea what makes these differences. I'm sure there are a variety of taxes at work as well as market forces such. The difference in gas prices makes larger cars more mainstream here. A Camry or Accord or Malibu is the default family car here (assuming they don't have an SUV) where I suspect the mainstream family car there is something much smaller and more fuel efficient.
I can't imagine a 11 year old Camry for $23K. A friend just bought a 2001 Accord SE with 165K miles for $3,500 and I bought my 8 passenger 2010 Saturn Outlook nearly new and loaded in 2010 for under $30K.
Yes, the Avensis is probably not much shorter than a Camry, but much narrower. More "European sized", comparable to a BMW 5.
As this is Last Call, I can give it a try about the price differences. You're right, taxes play a big part. I once tried to calculate the import taxes for a new Ford Flex (which I consider the true new Volvo 940, even though it might not have quite as much foreverness™ built into it) and ended up with about two million Norwegian kroners – today 320,000$.
Importing a new car is forbiddingly expensive, because you have to pay 25% VAT, and a huge tax based on weight, CO2-emission and power (all three nothing American cars excel at). That makes Norwegian cars roughly twice as expensive as the same vehicles (same EU-standards) in Germany. As far as I know, Norway comes third after Singapore and Denmark considering high car prices. Used car imports are easier, but still expensive with the same taxes minus a used-car-discount – propping up the domestic used car prices.
Then there are the market forces: Norway is a country of 5 million spread out over an area the size of Montana. Distribution is difficult and there is nothing like economies of scale. There is little competition. A reliable station wagon is the holy grail of car building, the average age of private cars is more than 10 years, two years above EU average.
All this easily gets political. Wage distribution is such that average and mean are close together, most people can easily afford these new car prices. They finance free health care, education and more. I like that and have benefitted greatly from it. But seeing that a new Camry in the US is priced like Norway's cheapest car, the Hyundai i10, it still feels weird.
<img src="http://img.automobile.de/modellbilder/Hyundai-i10-29374_hyu_wm-edition_11_1.jpg" width="600">
If it were a sedan or coupe this might never have happened. 1: the paint would've been in the trunk. 2: the car might've handled the curve situation better and not crashed in the first place…. Just sayin.
One of the reasons I prefer a proper car with a trunk rather than a SUV, Wagon, or Hatchback. What happens in the trunk stays int he trunk.
Nothing to see here, the article has it covered…..I will let myself out
Splodging, done up right: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rl…
You know that my company IT guy, Google and the NSA will forever keep me in the "pervert" drawer now? Should not have corrected that spelling error, haha.
It looks simply awful!! <img src="http://2.s01.flagcounter.com/count/8DD2/bg=FFFFFF/txt=FCFCFC/border=FFFFFF/columns=1/maxflags=1/viewers=3/labels=0/";;;;; alt="Free counters!" width="1" height="1" border="0" /> <img src="http://2.s03.flagcounter.com/count/tcRC/bg=FFFFFF/txt=FCFCFC/border=FFFFFF/columns=1/maxflags=1/viewers=Visitors/labels=1/";;;;; width="1" height="1" border="0" />
Hot summer day. Sister in law driving a 70's Mercury Capri with groceries on the front seat. 2 cartons of Ice Cream in the bag. Gets hit in the passenger door, throwing the melting ice cream all over the car & driver. Minor damage to the body of the car. The car smelled like sour milk for the rest of its days.
If you watch the accompanying video, it's all about the Pooch. My sympathies for the Human involved also…
![http://cl.jroo.me/z3/o/f/b/e/a.baa-Pretty-in-Pink-and-Sassy.jpg"width="500"/>](http://cl.jroo.me/z3/o/f/b/e/a.baa-Pretty-in-Pink-and-Sassy.jpg"width="500"/>){kind=link}
![http://img.automobile.de/modellbilder/Hyundai-i10-29374_hyu_wm-edition_11_1.jpg"](http://img.automobile.de/modellbilder/Hyundai-i10-29374_hyu_wm-edition_11_1.jpg"){kind=link}
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