A while back I got my son a green Hyundai Excel, old piece of crap, the idea was to use it for transportation to get a job. That worked well. :rolleyes: All he did was transport his useless GF around.
Anyway, bout 6 weeks ago he was doing some work for bloke and on the promise of getting some cash he put the car in to get fixed up. Bloke didn’t pay him, car stays at mechanics until he can pay for it. So he’s been on foot.
This morning about 5:50 I got up to take a piss and on the way back to bed see some people walking in my front yard with torches. Cops. Detectives actually. The car had been involved in an accident, a female passenger was in a bad way. Fuck. (they came to me cos the car was registered in my name).
The son has been living at the GF’s place, but I knew it couldn’t have been him driving it, I would have been told if he somehow got it back. So cops after getting a statement from me and the sons address off my daughter who woke up to the sound of us talking in the lounge room headed over to see him.
He’s all in the clear, he was in bed asleep, but he no longer has a car. Or a need to pay the mechanic I suppose.
Here’s a link to a mention of the incident.
Apparently there’s a good photo of what’s left of the excel on a Nine website but I can’t find it. Looks like the douche nozzle who pinched the car was a real classy piece of work. Doing a runner and leaving someone seriously injured behind is a cnuts act IMO.
Wonder if I can sue the mechanic for letting the car get stolen from his shop?
You can sue anyone for anything. Doesn’t mean that you will win.
I’m sorry you’ve had such a crappy thing happen. I will say that if you have to have a car stolen, I’d guess that getting one stolen from a shop would be the best way. Their insurance will cover your damages, AND the mechanic will be forced to swear that the car was in great running shape because he had just fixed it.
Someone still has to pay the mechanic. When he [your son] makes a claim to his insurance, be sure to include this bill so the mechanic can get paid.
Also, not to be ‘sneaky’, but if there are storage fees, which there probably aren’t if the mechanic is nice, he might want to bury them since the insurance company probably won’t pay them.
Again, just to be clear, just because car was stolen doesn’t mean the mechanic did the work for free. Put in a claim and let the insurance company deal with it, unless the mechanic wants to make the claim, which I doubt. The other option is for you or the mechanic to sue the guy, but that sounds like a much bigger hassle.
You’re implying that it’s not “nice” to charge a storage fee to a customer who dropped off his car 6 weeks ago and never returned. I completely disagree. The guy is in business as a mechanic, not a storage facility. In fact, I think he’d be perfectly justified in charging interest because he had to pay for parts in advance, out of his own pocket.
You’re right, that came out wrong. I have some friendly mechanics I work with on a very regular basis that I know I could leave a vehicle with for a while and not worry about being charged any kind of storage fees.
A ‘regular’ customer with no relationship with the mechanic, that’s different.
I tend to forget that there’s a difference since most of the business I do is B2B. A quick look shows that my business spent about 4K last year at our mechanic (on 4 vehicles I think). The owner of my business and the mechanic are friends, the mechanic buys gift cards from us to hand out to his other customers that spend a more than certain amount of money etc…
He may very well charge a random customer who walks in off the street to get a new radiator and ends up leaving their car their for a month. Like I said, I tend to forget, things are very different in the B2B world.
Also, just to be clear, you’re inferring, I wasn’t implying. Otherwise, anytime you told someone that they’d be nice if they’d do you a favor, you’d be implying that they’re not nice if they didn’t do it for you. “Hey john, it would be really nice if you’d drive me to the mall tomorrow”, “So you’re saying that if I don’t drive you I’m not nice?”.
There’s some word twisting in there. I didn’t say it wouldn’t be nice to charge the fees, I only said it would be nice to not charge them. Not one doesn’t imply the other. I also never spoke of interest, that was something you came up with on your own.