I see several of them a week-usually they’ll have an orange sticker (affixed by a policeman I’d guess) denoting that the vehicle will be towed if it is not picked up by the owner promptly. My question is why people basically just throw away vehicles they presumably have put a lot of time and money into-are they beaters which the owners simply don’t think are worth towing to a garage and spending money to fix? Are they drug dealers or some other nefarious types who don’t want to deal with red tape which could get some unwanted attention from the local constabulary?
People have breakdowns but no money to fix/tow them. If a rich guy has a breakdown, he calls AAA or a tow company and the car is taken for repair. If you have five dollars to your name when this happens (and you can’t fix it and/or can’t afford the parts to fix it), you’re stuck until you get some cash scraped together or a friend who can work on cars to help you out. It’s not usually a choice.
Do the dates indicate people are leaving there cars there a long time? I guess I never thought too much about it. Not everyone drives a new car, so people’s cars break down. Sometimes there’s other priorities than making immediate arrangements to have it towed and fixed (the weddings in an hour!) and interstates are regularly patrolled, so a half hour later a cop comes along and marks it.
Could be simply a way of getting rid of it with little effort.
Not sure if “promptly” is the right word here. I assumed it was more like a few days.
I will say that once when I got a flat, a police officer stopped pretty quickly, checked to make sure our spare had air, and that we were able to change it ourselves. She put a sticker on my car, but said if we were having trouble changing the tire, to take it off. She said any other police car going by would see the sticker, and know someone had already checked on us, and wouldn’t stop. So at least, it’s not a “tow this car immediately” sticker.
I’ve also wondered this. I hear ads on the radio from charities offering to tow your old car away for free (with the understanding that they will sell it and keep any proceeds), and you get a tax deduction for the fair market value of your car, so unless those charities refuse certain cars (e.g., “A 1983 Ford Escort that is covered in rust and that doesn’t start and is missing the spare tire? No thanks!”), I find it hard to believe that someone would intentionally leave the car by the side of the road in order to get rid of it.
Well I’ll be damned! I always thought those cars with orange stickers meant the car was left there by a hunter who went into the woods to hunt and the authorities should not consider the car abandoned. :smack:
If they abandoned their car in the middle of the highway, someone could get hurt.
Why are we assuming these cars are abandoned, never to be collected by their owners again as opposed to a break down where the owner got a ride from someone else and will return (with a fix or repair part) or have it towed later on. Could even just be that they ran out of gas and are walking to a gas station. The other thing the orange sticker does is let every other person that drives past the car know that they don’t have to call the police about it…they already know.
Because, of all the problems life is thowing their way at the time, a broke-down car is either the least important or the hardest to solve.
This is pretty much the case. When I was on the freeway unit the warning was for 2 hours. This gave enough time for someone to walk to a gas station and call for a tow/ride. Believe it or not, not everyone has a working cell phone. Very few cars that got towed ended up not being picked up within the day. So most cars on the highway weren’t actually abandoned.
I don’t know anyone who is poor to pretty much lower middle class, not a homeowner and childless who itemizes their deductions, so a “tax deduction” is meaningless to them. In fact, I now make a comfortable middle class salary and since I don’t own a home and don’t have kids or medical problems, there’s STILL no benefit to itemizing over taking the standard deduction of $5800.
I once had a car that blew its timing chain on the highway which pretty much instantly destroyed the engine. Amazingly, it happened less than a mile from my mechanic. I had AAA and they towed it to my mechanic who broke the bad news. I just gave him the car to do whatever he wanted with it. I couldn’t get any benefit from a tax deduction and it wasn’t worth my time to deal with trying to sell it for scrap.
I always thought they were being chased by an international gang of thieves for accidentally taking their bag of diamonds at the airport and they were fleeing on foot through the woods and are keeping a low profile in an abandoned log house somewhere.
A tax deduction is worth nothing to anyone who doesn’t have enough deductions to itemize. If you don’t own a house or have catastrophic medical bills, you are not going to get any advantage from one.
maybe the Barney tape wouldn’t eject or stop and it was driving them nuts.
Just an anecdote:
The house I bought was previously owned by a deadbeat couple with a deadbeat son. Not only did they leave his broken car parked in front of the house (with three flat ties and a transmission problem), they filled it up with trash. I guess they thought it would become my problem to dispose of (from what the neighbors said), but I was lucky. Because they left a licensed vehicle on the street, the law was very specific about it being THEIR problem.
These people were not even poor - just chronically, unbelievably lazy and irresponsible.
After experiencing that, nothing would surprise me about abandoned cars.
It was me. I’ve abandoned at least 3 cars on the side of the road. I have owned a lot of junkers.
One threw a rod. One I had paid $300.00 for, and it was debatable if it was worth that, but it did run for a few weeks, so I guess it was after all. One caught fire.
I would just leave them there and get a ride home. Later, I would get a notice from the impounder that if I didn’t pay the towing and storage, they would keep the car. Yay! Problem solved.
Texas does not leave cars on the side of the road for long- no fancy orange stickers for us!
It could also be that it wasn’t the owner who abandoned it. When my husband car was stolen, it was ultimately abandoned on the side of the highway. The police contacted us to let us know.
A non-running POS car is quite possibly worth less than the cost of a tow. Those charity groups either own their own tow trucks or contract with a towing company who in turn write off the tow-- in other words, even if they won’t refuse to tow your non-running decades old junker, they might not actually make any money off it.
Usually there is a tow company that contracts with the county or city and has to tow away junk vehicles even if you can’t pay, but hey why bother calling around to figure out which one it is when you can just abandon your car at your convenience and let them do the work?
We are homeowners with two children and two incomes. I check both ways every year, and except for the year we adopted our girls, we’ve never been able to come out ahead by itemizing.