Yes, my one month old pristine Lakeshore Blue G35 met up unexpectedly with a neighborhood kid's bicycle in my driveway yesterday. It put a 6 inch GASH down the passenger door. On top of the paint damage, the panel itself is dented from the impact too. The icing on the cake is that the kid's bike was not even hurt. I wanted to take my wife's Suburban and flatten it! So, I'll now get to experience the $$ of my local Infiniti body shop. I'm guessing I'm hurt for at least $500.... What a bummer - like somebody said - "can't have anything!"

Also, I have decreed a new rule for my house - any bicycles or toys in the driveway will be immediately confiscated and sold on ebay or thrown in a dumpster!!

 

Was the kid riding it and crashed into your car? If so, the parents should pay for it.

If not, and it was stationary and you drove into it with out looking around the vehicle... well, it won't make you feel much better... but just be glad it wasn't the kid.

 

I'm confused. Was it your kid? Or was it a neighbors kid? If it's a neighbors kid, his parents are responsible for the repair. If it's your kid he loses Xbox and his allowance for a month.

 

I love how ppl tell him what to do.. take ur kids xbox box away... hahah, nice... nice though

 

Black is the only color infiniti/nissan will guarantee a match. Let me know how the work looks--I am sure they will have to blend into adjacent panels. It is funny how you can keep some cars for years with no paint work--and others--boom--a few months and hello paint work.

 

For those who have inquired more on the bicycle attack on my G - No, the kid was not on it. I always make a habit of eyeballing all the kids before backing out, I guess I need another set of eyes for all the toys. One of the reasons I am so p@$%#@ is that this kid's parents are so absent, they wouldn't know if he (a 5 year old) walked out of the neighborhood and never came back. I would ask them to pay for it but they are the kind who would ask for proof that their kid was the one who left HIS bike there... Oh, well - we'll see what Infiniti body shop can do...

 

as a point of reference, in most staes (if not all) the kids parents wouldn't be legally responsible. i.e. a kid doing what a kid does (leaving his bike to run off and play) is not considered the parents fault. Only if the kid did something with malice would the parents be held accountable.

That has nothing to do with the moral/ethical obligation....

But all of that is meaningless when compared with the pain of seeing your G damaged
I feel your pain.

 

And as another point of reference... if he wasn't on it and the bike was stationary parked next to the vehicle, I would think it was your fault for not looking around the car to make sure nothing was in the way.

I know you didn't want to hear that, and I sure don't do a complete 360 around the car before I go anywhere... but then again, I don't have kids, so I don't expect anything to be around my cars unless I put it there. Otherwise, somebody was trespassing. But with kids coming and going, you never know what will be around or where it will be...

Still sucks, no doubt.

 

I was under the impression that a kid rode his bike into the parked G.

 

Sorry to hear about the dammage. You can go after the parents for the money, but if it were me id leave it be and just suck it up. No sense in pissing off the neighbors and making enemys on the street you live on.

But to hopefully brighten your day...$500 is kinda high. I have a friend with an FX that had a massive dent/paint dammage on the drivers door and it was like $300 to pull the dent and repaint the whole door.

 

I just had something similar happen Saturday evening.

We went into the garage to go out for the evening and as I rounded the back of the car to get to the driver's side door I noticed a big plastic rooftop car carrier had tipped from its spot and fallen into the rear quarterpanel of my car! We've had this thing standing there in the same spot for a year and it had never moved so much as an inch, my car had been parked in the garage every single night for three weeks, and suddenly Saturday night it decided to fall. *sigh*

Fortunately it isn't very heavy. It left a small dent and about a dozen or more half-inch long scratches right through the clearcoat and into the paint (no bare metal, thank goodness). The guy who's head of the paint shop at one of the best local bodyshops is the son of one of my secretaries. He's got a fully-equipped paint booth at his home in his 3-bay garage and he's going to fix it for me over the weekend - pull the dent, paint the quarterpanel and roofrail to make sure it matches without having to "burn in" the old and new paint. I'll drop it off Friday evening, he'll do it over the weekend and I'll have the car back Sunday night. $300.

And I haven't even made the first payment yet!