¡Miami esta la pinga!

There I know enough Spanish to swear in it

Coming home from work, I’m sitting at a long red light wondering how to drink the last bit of coconut water from an irresponsibly tall carton of it because the thing his the ceiling before it tilts enough. I’m sitting there stopped for about ten seconds when… Bang.

The car stalls instantly. No airbags fired but the fucking coconut water is now airborne before landing on my nice red leather trenchcoat. Fuck a duck.

I get out kinda in disbelief, stunned and shaken but unhurt. The first thing I see is the car behind me with the front end totally munched!

The driver gets out and she’s really apologetic and rubbing her forehead. I look at the back of my car and, well…

image
What even are these things made of

Look at all that damage! Uh, look hard…. It’s just not there.

We exchange information and the driver goes on and on about how she’d rather pay out of pocket for my repairs because she is on SR-22 insurance. The classic strategy for trying to escape liability in the ghetto….

But there’s no damage to my car and I’m not even mad.

Then she points out she wasn’t wearing her seat belt and her head hit the glass.

No.

I’m mad now damn it.

F=ma, bitch.

I’m an engineer. Trust me. Buckle up.

She’s going on about how her car is brand new (to her) and she just wrecked it…. I didn’t know what sr-22 meant at the time but it apparently means she’s crashed at fault three times in a year??

Now, why did her car pretty much take it up the nose from my rear bumper? It wasn’t the car’s first crash either. Looking in the grille, the metal part of the bumper was crushed back into the AC condenser…. and rusted like that. Someone had just slapped new plastic parts and paint on the car, leaving it with no actual bumper, so it neatly crushed the hood on impact.

Well. Maybe now you’ll stop texting and driving and for fuck’s sake buckle up. You wouldn’t mail fragile items without padding…. Don’t stick yourself in a big metal box unprotected.

My car wouldn’t crank for a couple minutes after the crash but then just reset?! Not sure what to make of that, but I guess it needed time to convince itself it was safe to restart.

Oh Miami, you fabulous jizz whistle.

2 thoughts on “¡Miami esta la pinga!”

  1. NHTSA rules require that the fuel pump shut off in the event of a collision to avoid fueling a fire. A pretty common way auto manufacturers implement this is by having a feature on the SRS (airbag system) that cuts engine power when an impact is detected, even if it’s below the threshhold or in the wrong direction for the airbags to fire. Some cars used to have a manual reset, but on most modern cars I think it resets automatically after a bit.

    1. That explains it. Mine did auto reset. Mazda and Ford vehicles used to always have an inertial circuit breaker in the trunk or elsewhere on the chassis that pops up and disconnects the pump if you get a good whack. I was looking for this, didn’t find it, but the car started again after I’d spent a while searching.

      Makes sense to kill the fuel pump, definitely… Gasoline being shot out of a damaged fuel line can ruin your whole day.

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