Peter called me this morning as I was writing about Green Gulch Farms. “Did you get my picture?” he asked. I’d received nothing by phone or email.
He’d sent me a picture of his now-crushed car, and asked me to pick him up on the freeway with the possessions he’d been able to salvage from inside. He’d successfully stopped behind an abruptly-slowing station wagon, and then an SUV had plowed into him, and another truck into that SUV. That had driven Peter’s car into the station wagon in front of him. His car was mushed, and he’d been trapped behind the airbags until one of the other people in the accident had come out and opened the door for him. Here’s what it looked like after it had been pulled away from the other vehicles:
Luckily, everyone involved was uninjured, though Peter was understandably mentally shaken. I picked him up with the possessions he’d been able to salvage from inside (and alas, a full case of diet Coke now remains trapped in the crushed corpse of Peter’s VW Golf.) Against the case for more environmentally-friendly cars, the larger cars who’d been in the collision were only slightly damaged. And when Peter worried about the gasoline that was now pouring from his broken gasoline tank, the California Highway Patrol officers told him he was just lucky he didn’t have a hybrid. Apparently, the electrical systems are supposed to shut off after a collision, but, well, since they’re broken at that point, they often don’t. And the combination of electricity and gasoline isn’t nice.
So, we’re getting a new car, and I suspect it won’t be a hybrid.
P.S. Peter hadn’t paid his car registration (which was due next month) yet, so he saved, um, $75. Yeah!