Head Tale

As hard as it is to believe, we’ve just had almost the same accident occur in the street in front of our house nearly four years apart.

Four years ago in May, a hit & run driver smashed into our neighbour’s van which was parked on the street behind our car. His van was pushed into our vehicle and both vehicles ended up being written off.  The hit & run driver was never caught and my neighbour and I were both out our deductibles because of that.

Then, last Saturday night, we got a text from a neighbour that our current car had been hit.  We hadn’t heard anything but I ran upstairs, worried that another person who was drunk or in a stolen vehicle, like we suspect was the case last time, would take off again.

Luckily, the young man who had hit us stuck around to deal with the consequences. And it turns out he wasn’t drunk but had simply taken his eyes off the road when something fell over on his seat.  But that doesn’t change the fact that we went outside to find this…

It’s a very unfortunate situation – our car was one that had been bought new by my grandfather over ten years ago, inherited by my parents when grandpa passed away and then transferred to me when our last car was smashed.  For these reasons, it was really well kept, completely paid for and with extremely low mileage for a 2003 vehicle (still under 100,000km).  Its size and fuel efficiency made it a perfect second car which I mainly used to drive to work and back home.

But now SGI is writing it off and since a mechanic we know says it’s probably not worth repairing even if we wanted to, I have to try to negotiate with SGI to see if they’ll give me a settlement to replace what I’ve lost with something comparable – not just in terms of year and model but the very low mileage and the intangibles that come with having a family-owned car with a history that you know completely (something you don’t even get if you buy a year old used car off a lot!)

Luckily, Shea was off most of the week as Pace is out of school so I could use our van to get to work. Then today, her parents have just left for a tropical holiday so they’re letting me use their car for a week.  Then, depending where things are at, SGI said they will also cover the cost of a rental for a period of time as well.

In doing my research, I see there’s one car in Regina and area that’s comparable to what I’ve lost – same make & model, same year and (somewhat unbelievably given how rare this is for cars that old) roughly the same mileage. But as you’d expect, the price the seller is asking is more than SGI is valuing our car at.  So now I have to negotiate to try to get them to raise their settlement offer.

Hopefully I can make the case!