I love my Nissan. I mean OK, it’s brown. But inside it’s also leathery brown and fake-wooden brown and is comfy and I can see all edges of this Nissan X-Trail. Yeah, OK, I burn a hole into the Ozone layer with my 2000cc (2WD) and a guy with a 3000cc Cefiro (2WD) or a 300 hp BMW doesn’t… OK, I know that.
But now some old fa… I mean an elder gentleman in Taiwan, dressed in a way that would make a clochard (guy sleeping on the streets) in Paris feel some real social pressure by his comrades and with a bike that had its last service when Chiang Kai Shek was still in the spring of his love life, has smashed into my car at high velocity. A big bang, guy lying on the ground, talking a bit fuzzy afterwards. But I honestly think that was because his teeth never fitted right. So my car has a big dent in the tailgate and below some scratches. Would say the damage is 1000 Euro back home, maybe 20 000 NT here, not sure.
Then the guy offers us 1000NT, and as my wife told him No, 1000NT plus his motor cycle. Finally he agrees to pay 10.000 NT and we bring him home.
Well, in the end we left with 9000NT. OK, the people seemed poor and so wife said via police and court we might spend 1-3 years and finally get nothing.
As this may happen again, any suggestions what to do next time? Experience in similar situations?
That’s why you sometimes see these old fuckers getting the tar beaten out of them by irate car drivers. The drivers know there’s bugger all chance of getting full recompense from these bumbling peasants, so they figure they might as well exact at least SOME kind of justice. Just don’t let maoman see you doing it or he might kick your arse.
Yeah, my wife said if she would have been driving she would have kicked him around. Now that would have been a show.
Usually we take our 13yo Opel Corsa for the dog related missions (it was one), because we end up driving to unchartered territory where one of our members has a temporary dog place and such.
But once we take the Nissan… bang.
ups… wife reads this thread as well. Better to be careful
BTW: our Corsa is in the same condition as the whole of GM, thanks to Taiwanese car keys, trucks and likewise… But remarkably stable. Buy an Opel today.
What are you grumbling about? I don’t think you’re going to be out of pocket - NT10,000 sounds more than adequate to repair a dented tailgate. I’ve caved in a whole roof in an underground parking lot and got it filled and resprayed for less than that (and the job was good enough that you couldn’t tell it had been in an accident). Seriously, count your blessings.
for the next time just wait for the police and use them as a way to put some pressure on the guy, dont let the issue get too legal or as u mentioned it will take from 1 to 3 years, just use them to ask for a bit more money… and if the guy wants to run away chase him and get the money by the bad way… :fume:
Just for reference the standard price for bodywork is NT$3000 per panel. Always has been and with the economy the way it is, it always will be. Three grand per panel and you’re okay. Lights and other stuff are another story.
The Ginge is right, Bob. I’d have just let it go. It’s only a car, and as long as no one was hurt, what does it matter if the metal machine you transport yourself around in has the odd dent or scratch here and there.
A couple of teenage girls lost control of their scooter and clattered into my car last week. After making sure they were okay, I told them to move to the side of the road to talk about it. They looked as nervous as hell, fearing expensive consequences and mafan for damaging the foreigner’s nice little car. After sternly admonishing them that they could easily have got themselves seriously hurt or killed and should be a great deal more careful in future, I inspected the dent and scratches, shook my head, closed the incident with a suan le, and sent them on their way. They were obviously just kids - my wife reckoned they were highschoolers - and I’m sure they’d have struggled to pay for putting the damage right. Their hardship in having to do so would have been far too disproportionate to my minor hardship in driving a cosmetically damaged car, so the only right course was to let it go.
Yeah, I felt bad when I was sitting in his home, more a barn than a house, with his blind dog eying at me, excuse the expression, his wife yelling, knowing there will be no more food on the table for a while. An old Peugeot 405 was standing in the room as well, hadn’t seen the roads for years, as the guy was unemployed. Wanted us to hire him, good little guy.
Howeverrrrrr…Seeing my dent I think he should have payed a lot more
The scooter was totally OK, barely a scratch, but my Nissan looked quite dented.
And the whole thing was a lesson from the gods. Because we were visiting a bunch of puppies with black fur and white legs. They had been abandoned and no-one wants them, because, my wife explained, white legs are believed to bring bad luck in Taiwan (something about white funeral stockings in the past).
Well, I think about nurses when I hear about white stockings , so I kinda laughed at the superstitious locals just a minute before the crash came…
[quote=“Omniloquacious”]The Ginge is right, Bob. I’d have just let it go. It’s only a car, and as long as no one was hurt, what does it matter if the metal machine you transport yourself around in has the odd dent or scratch here and there.
A couple of teenage girls lost control of their scooter and clattered into my car last week. After making sure they were okay, I told them to move to the side of the road to talk about it. They looked as nervous as hell, fearing expensive consequences and mafan for damaging the foreigner’s nice little car. After sternly admonishing them that they could easily have got themselves seriously hurt or killed and should be a great deal more careful in future, I inspected the dent and scratches, shook my head, closed the incident with a suan le, and sent them on their way. They were obviously just kids - my wife reckoned they were highschoolers - and I’m sure they’d have struggled to pay for putting the damage right. Their hardship in having to do so would have been far too disproportionate to my minor hardship in driving a cosmetically damaged car, so the only right course was to let it go.[/quote]
I’d do the same thing. Well done.
A year or so back I was driving our SUV home after dropping my daughter off at school and some guy came roaring out of nowhere and hit me on his scooter. He fell off. I pulled over to the side of the road and stepped out of the car, ready to help him up. He got up on his own, cursing and hollering. He admonished me for not signaling. I had signaled, and told him so. He then told me I’d been going too fast into the right turn. I’d been going about 15kph, and told him so. Then he told me “You have to look before you turn!” I had looked, very carefully, but he’d come flying out of a gas station on that corner and had run right into me as I was turning. I interrupted his next statement with a “So, you’re not hurt then?” He said that he was only a bit scratched up, and admonished me to be more careful in the future. I got back in my car and drove home.
It wasn’t until I got home and inspected the car more thoroughly that I understood what all of his bluster was about. He’d put a big dent in the side of my car, near the rear, in a place that made it patently obvious who’d been at fault. Cagey bastard. My wife dubbed me a fool. I agreed, and resolved to handle things a bit differently next time.
A car is not just a metal container in which we travel the city. For some (not many in Taiwan) it’s a hobby. At the very least, it represents a huge financial investment. It infuriates me how disrespectful so many people are here about other people’s cars. People think nothing of banging their door into another car. Scooters scrape past all the time without even a look.
Over the past year, I have spent a pile of money restoring an old classic, including a new paint job from which I’ll pick it up this weekend. I would be hard pressed NOT to resort to violence in the situation the OP describes.
ups… wife reads this thread as well. Better to be careful 
, so I kinda laughed at the superstitious locals just a minute before the crash came… 