Chris Rock said it best “because you never know”. I had one of those moments in the Mazda 2 heading to a MazdasNW monthly meet in November. The weather was less than exciting with it being dark and raining while driving up to Seattle for the meet. Kelly (check out some of her blogs) was riding with me to meet some of our customers.
About an hour into the drive traffic bunched up a little bit but we were still doing the speed limit then I got a surprise. The sport ute in front of me kicked up a truck tire re-tread. My options were pretty limited on what I could do so I just held the wheel straight and took the hit. The re-tread was about 2-3 feet long and it clipped the hood and hit the windshield with the majority of its mass. This caused an instant spidering of the windshield right in front on my view. Kelly mentioned in her surprise a colorful 4 letter word and we kept on driving. There wasn’t much point in trying to stop to look at the damage with all of the traffic.
Back to the “because you never know” quote, as I had one of our Xcorders installed in the Mazda 2 I have the entire video of the tire being kicked up and impacting the 2. The shock sensor in the Xcorder recorded the video in the event save folder automatically.
The tire hit the windshield at a force of over 2gs that the Xcorder registered. I had someone ask me where it happened. I honestly couldn’t remember where. I took a guess and said around Ft Lewis. When I went back and looked later at the video it showed it happened just North of Olympia with the exact location shown on the GPS in the Xcorder which is about 20 miles away from where I thought it occurred.
The good thing is my insurance company did not give me any difficulty in getting a claim going for the repair of the damage. The total damage to the Mazda 2 is over $2000. A good chunk of that cost is to take apart the front end of the car to re-spray/blend the silver paint. I didn’t even have to break out the video to show them what happened. If there had been some questions I would have been able to provide them with enough information to remove doubt as to what had happened all from the inexpensive $200 Xcorder.
– Derrick