I have a funny story related to a younger friend of mine. He bought a decent looking 2007 or 2008 Malibu for like $3000 at an auction before the pandemic prices went wild. It was his first real car so guess having a few incidents is normal. Apparently the younger generation thinks texting and driving is OK so ran over plenty of curbs. At least three of his rims were all bent and there was a shake going down the road. His plastic wheel covers were also pretty cracked up and bad looking.
He also got some garish orange advertising wrap put on his car (not a scam) for some out of state college. They paid him like $250 a month as long as he drove X miles and tracked this using an app on the phone. Well this wrap started to peel and got even worse looking with time. He also managed to crack some trim pieces which was more apparent because of the wrap.
One day he called me because he had a flat tire and didn’t know how to change it so I went over there. He had been texting and ran over a curb at a pretty high rate of speed. One of the tires had exploded with a loud bang like a gunshot and there was a major square kink in that rim the shape of a standard street curb. The tire and wheel were trash.
I am standing there staring at this car with an ugly wrap peeling off, trim pieces cracked and loose, a destroyed tire and rim, and other bent rims with the plastic wheel covers hanging off and broken. At this point he tells me “My car was actually pretty nice when I first got it” and my response was “Well you sure took care of that!” He didn’t quite know how to take that.
Then his dad calls while I am there putting the spare on. I could tell his dad was terrified of this guy trying to do anything to his own car and I let him know I had done this plenty of times before.
No one had the rims and he needed to go like 100 miles the next day. I called around to several places and finally found a really low-end used car lot that is indistinguishable from a junkyard and he got used tires and rims for like $40 that got him where he needed to go. He did end up getting a new set of tires the next day.
Then all the crazy accidents started that were no fault of his own. People kept running into his car. Some were hit and runs. One was a guy avoiding getting crushed by a semi so he ran into my friend’s car instead. By that point my friend didn’t even care and didn’t want insurance money or anything.
Then it went in for an oil change and the shop basically said there was no oil in the pan and it was burning it. They told him to come back in two weeks and the level was half down from capacity. He traded it off and got $500. Basically the mechanic and the dealership told him the car was crap and to just give up on it which he did. So far the new car has been doing OK but it seemed like the old one was cursed.