The Sad Demise of the Grand Am

For a dozen years now, we've owned a beautiful, black Pontiac Grand Am.  That car has stood us in good stead and we've loved it.

Enter a teenage boy.

When Bryce acquired his license last November, my husband passed the Grand Am on to him and he began driving a vehicle his mother had lent us (a truck that I loathe, but that my husband just purchased from her officially when she was here a few weeks back - groan, how I hate that monstrous behemoth of a vehicle, which takes up so much of the garage space and forces me to suck in my gut every time I want to climb into the driver's seat of my van).  If you ask me, this was quite generous.  I was never handed a car when I reached the driving age.  The boy's a lucky dude!

Within a few months of driving it, he had his first minor fender bender in the school parking lot.  He came out to find his windows fogged up with condensation.  He thought it was frost and tried to scrape the outside, but this accomplished nothing, so ... he just got in and tried to drive with limited vision.  He said he waited for a long time at the intersection and finally pulled out ... right in front of an oncoming car.  Her car was barely scratched, but he managed to damage the front corner of the bumper and lose a headlight.  No insurance information was exchanged and we decided to merely cover the repairs ourselves.

Now, he has had another accident.  Granted, we are extremely grateful that in both instances there was no bodily harm.  If he had been pulling out onto the main road home from school (instead of still in the parking lot) he would have encountered cars coming at 55 m.p.h.  In this second accident, he was driving two fellow football players home from school.  The accident occurred right in town, so the speeds were only around 30 m.p.h., but still, if the other driver had collided a few seconds earlier then the boy in the back seat could have been hit.  God was watching out for our boy and his friends.  Bryce thought he had enough time to make a turn and turned in front of a woman who (as he indignantly puts it) "didn't bother to slow down at all."  She clipped the back end of the vehicle and pulled off the rear fender.

Sadly, our insurance company has written the car off as a total loss (since repairs would probably be more than the value of the car).  So, now the boy and his dad are scanning used auto businesses in our area for a replacement car. As I said, he's a lucky dude!  We're hoping whatever we purchase will last him through his college years.  At this rate, though, it is looking a bit grim.  This is a sad good-bye to a well-loved car.