OneAndOneIs2

Last year, I was making my last trip to my parents' place in France to drop off the last of my possessions prior to setting off on my tour of Europe.

The car was full of stuff, most of it not very securely in place. Including my GPS which had no holder so was sitting loose on the passenger seat. So I was going around corners very carefully to avoid havin anything slide around.

Despite this, on one corner between motorways, the car suddenly began to slide. It shouldn't have done, it was nowhere near the breakaway point, but it did. I can only assume there was oil on the road or something, because I'd owned that car five years, I knew where its limits where, and I know for a fact I was nowhere near them.

But it slid. Going around a bend to the right, it oversteered. The driver's side (right) front wheel made contact with the right kerb, which promptly lead to the car slowing down in speed but accelerating in spin, it did a 180 and the passenger side came hard into contact with the metal crash barrier.

The engine continued to work, luckily, and I was able to restart the car and limp off the road and onto the hard shoulder and assess the damage.

Passenger door had a cut in it, the sill underneath it was bent to hell. Passenger side wheel had a cut in it but was holding up. Driver's side wheel was not just punctured but physically ripped apart. Not just the TYRE, mark you: The alloy wheel itself was ripped open.

I eventually managed to jack the car up and fit the spare, and then I had a hundred miles between me and home. I had no breakdown cover and my insurance was only third-party outside the UK. I limped along, the steering wheel rotated some 20 degrees to the right in order to make the car steer straight.

I made it, eventually, and was very relieved. I got a new tyre fitted to the passenger side and that was about all I could really do to fix it at the time.

Some time later, I got it back to the UK and jacked it up to have a proper look at the damage. The driver's side wishbone, which is a major piece of armour in the modern corsa, was bent utterly out of shape and mute testament to just how much of an impact that wheel had taken (if the rent in the alloy wasn't testament enough)

A petrolhead friend accompanied me to a scrapyard and we ripped a new wishbone off a scrapped car and fitted it to my car. This gave me the confidence to go around corners with it again, tho the steering was still knackered, the bodywork was battered, and the engine was leaking oil...

But at the end of this month, it was due for it's MOT test. And I knew it wasn't going to pass without major repair work.

So: absolute, absolute minimum it was going to cost me to get the car patched up to be roadworthy, assuming I did everything myself, was 200 pounds. If I got it done professionally, easily 1000. The car, in perfect working order, was worth 2-3k.

I weighed up the pros and cons, thought it all through, and decided to flog the car as-is to a car dealer. Rang several, got a ballpark figure of the car's value, then had one come round to look at it and haggled for a while. We settled on an amount and the understanding that he could have the car in a day or two, as soon as I'd bought a new one.

So yesterday, with petrolhead friend in tow again, I went around a few of the local dealers. Was briefly tempted by a 1.8 BMW 3-series for twice what I'd get for my old Corsa, but on closer inspection I noticed that the exhaust was rusted mostly through, and Tina recognised that the suspension was going, and the thought of what it would to to my insurance rates...

So out came the phone and the map and we started plotting out private sales.

Eventually, after a lot of dodgy stuff and "Sorry, already sold"s we found the car I finally settled on. Advertised price was equal to what I would get for the Corsa, so it actually cost me nothing. I could have haggled but didn't want to be outbid by other interested buyers.

It's a Ford Fiesta. The Mk3. '94 plates. 1.3 litre engine - the Kent crossflow, a very popular engine with tuners in its day. Or so I understand. From having read the Haynes book...

It does actually feel when you drive it as though the engine is being strangled and has a lot more potential than it's been allowed. But, aside from a bottle of red-ex engine-cleaning fuel additives, that can wait.

So I bought the Fiesta, sold the Corsa, and we went to the pub to celebrate that I had finally bought a new car and Tina had finally bought a new house. (Hers cost more but mine will go faster ;o)

Today I started looking around for insurance and breakdown cover. I could have just changed my existing cover, but it was costing me nearly 40 quid a month and you just know they would have put the prices up. So I cancelled it - which will cost me 40 quid, the bastards - and got new cover through the Post Office, which will cost me only 20 a month. So still works out cheaper even with the cancellation fee.

The P.O. offered breakdown cover with the RAC for a mere 80 pounds. But RAC cover via their own website was less than half that, so I didn't bother.

So I have a replacement car with a year's MOT and half the cost of insurance, and it didn't really cost me anything. Quite a successful weekend, really!

P.S.
I just got reminded I needed to include this:
I took my laptop with me in case we needed it at any point, what with its mobile broadband and all. And at one point we did indeed want to look up some insurance stuff. So I pulled over and fired up the laptop and started looking at insurance websites.

Or trying to, at least: The connection was phenominally slow, and when it dropped to (and stayed at) 0kb/sec download speed for over a minute, I gave up in disgust and shut the laptop down.

I then turned the car round and we headed for the next address on our list. The GPS said "At the end of the road, turn left."

Just as we arrived at the end of the road, the GPS said "Turn right"

Already committed to turning left, I yelled at it and it suddenly said "make a U-turn" and a glance at the screen showed that it still thought we were halfway down the road we'd just turned out of and were spinning slowly on the spot.

At this point, Tina cracked up and dissolved into laughter until her cold caught up with her and she dissolved into a coughing fit.

When her faculty of speech returned, she explained that she'd been amused by the fact that I appeared to have superfast mobile broadband that didn't actually download, a GPS that got lost, and a CD player that was at the time playing Disney's "Circle of life"