Recently Dimple experienced her own terrible car breakdown story which she will hopefully pen down in the comments. We wanna hear about ur car breakdown stories (USA / India).
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Must be around 100 cars in KV. Not one of them had a breakdown? 🙂
Well in absence of any interest, I will put down Dimple’s car breakdown myself. 🙂
The low petrol light had come on but the driver felt he could still reach to pick up Dimple from her office. The car ran out of petrol at Pune Station (15 mins from her office). Dimple had to take a rickshaw to Pune Station to get to the car. Unfortunately she just had 500 Rs or so with her that day.
The driver went and got some petrol in a bottle. The car did not start after that also. So he went and got 2 more litres. Car still wont start. the battery had run out somehow. Dimple just had 250 Rs since she paid the rest for the petrol.
Now a RTO guy came there and asked driver and Dimple to move the car. Apparently some VIP was going to pass by. He threatened to issue a fine otherwise. Now moving the car was not that simple. They pushed the car and put it at a nearby location but still on the main road. Driver managed to convince RTO not to tow the car but to take his license instead. The clouds were starting to turn darker and it could rain anytime. The RTO also wanted to fine the driver for carrying petrol in a bottle.
Unfortunately there is no AAA service like in the US whom you can call for help. Finally the driver went somewhere and got a person with jumper cables. The battery worked after this and Dimple came home.
Once she came home it rained in Pune like there was no tomorrow. 🙂
2 incidents:
1…my roomie had gone to india for a month or so…and he had a ford jeep…the battery was out…we got AAA to start the car and he did so quickly and asked us to keep the car running for half an hour…so we drove around South Bay and after an hour or so stopped at Starbucks thinking that the battery would be fine by now… but as soon as we stopped our car…the car wouldn’t start again…and we had to call the AAA guys again…eventually we had to replace the battery…
2…this is a more interesting one…on the similar lines of what Dimple experienced…we were around 19 of us…and we were heading towards Crater Lake during September 2011 long weekend…one of our friend was driving a Dodge Charger…and he didn’t see the gas indicator and was driving happily…suddenly the car stopped accelerating…and he had to pull over his car to the shoulder on a freeway…luckily we had other 2 cars approx 5-10 miles behind the Dodge…they rushed to the nearby gas station and got 2 bottles of gas but wasn’t sufficient…so they had to rush back…and in this rush one of the cars got a speeding ticket…the weather also turned bad…with dark clouds…drizzling rain…and low visibility…finally the car started…and they reached Klamath Falls city (near Crater Lake) around 1-2 in the night…the best part of this incident was that he didn’t see the gas indicator blinking…anyways…whenever we friends head for a road trip and he drives…we always remind him of the gas indicator…hahaha
My first story is not of a break down but amongst the first few days of starting to drive in the US.
I was on my way to office going on N 101. I use to take the Old Oakland Rd exit. On this particular day, I was behind a pick up truck – someone that ran a paint/construction business. (This story also laid the foundation for my reluctance to follow cars/vans when driving :)). Anyway, to get back to my story: I was about 2 exits away and a big 5 gallon paint bucket falls out of the truck. With a packed 101 in the morning, there was not much I would do to avoid the bucket – except slam the brakes. But even then, the bucket went under the car and got lodged under the belly of the car. At the amount of sound that the bucket was making being scraped under the car, it felt like something had come loose from the car and was being dragged. I managed to drive the car to the side of the road and stooped to see the damage. Seeing the bucket under the car was a relief though as I could not see any other damage. I had to kick the bucket with all my might to get it dislodged.
The second story is one that was not even my car: I was working for a consulting firm and had to go for an interview at a client’s office in Sacramento. A manager from the consulting company took me to Sacramento from Fremont. His car broke down on the way back, near Vacaville. Where we got stuck was a major merge with trucks hurtling down the freeway. It was nerve wrecking to sit in the car in no-man’s land between the merging lane on the right and the freeway traffic on the left. The guy’s cell phone had run out of battery after our first 2 calls to and there was nothing we could do but wait. Three cops came by before a tow truck arrived. Given the tow truck company’s alliances, we were towed back 10-12 miles, rather than the next exit that we could see. Several hours later and totally amazed at someone’s regard for safety of others, I made it home with a firm resolution to never trust someone else to drive me someplace important.
We had another interesting one where our van ran out of gas near Gilroy mall – luckily within very close proximity of Walmart and a gas station. The van stalled in the middle of the road. We were fortunate enough to be helped by some strangers to push the van into a parking lot. Then walked over to Walmart (I think) to get a 2 gallon gas carton, walked over to the gas station to fill it up and then back to the car. Since then we (almost) always take the spare gas carton on our long road trips.