Why do people abandon their cars on the side of the highway?

[Bear_Nenno]

@Doug_K

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.

Exactly. I own two homes, and still come out better by taking the standard deduction.

[Zsofia]

You guys must be well into your mortgages - I’d lose TONS of money if I didn’t itemize!

I once had to leave my car on the side of the road because it was the middle of the night, I had a flat so I put the spare on at my friend’s house, then five miles down the road the spare came up flat. I had my friend come pick me up and I got the tire patched the next day and retrieved it. It already had an orange sticker (which I had the impression also meant “probably not a body in this car, or if there is it’s in the trunk”.)

[chappachula]

@johnpost

maybe the Barney tape wouldn’t eject and it was driving them nuts.

That’s a perfectly good reason for abandoning not only the car, but also the kid!

Do the police put orange stickers on kids, too?

[Critical1]

the short version,
Personal Revenge.

the long version, (no this was not me, it was a friend of mine though) buddy worked for a guy who went out of business without paying his employees so my buddy kept the car he had been using for work in the hopes of getting paid…no such luck.
fast forward 2 years the car is dying, buddy has no use for it, and discovers something a bit strange, the car is still registered to his Former boss’s BROTHER. seems he bought the car without transferring the title…so he abandoned it next to the freeway. Here in Washington if a car gets towed it racks up storage fees until it gets auctioned off, at which point you owe the tow company for the difference (if it sells for less than the storage fee)

Honestly I laughed at the thought of the family drama that must have caused.

[coremelt]

In Australia we have plenty of companies that will tow away any car running or not and give you a small percentage of what they can get from the wreckers. You’d always get at least $50 because theres always going to a few hundred dollars of usable parts no matter what shape a car is in.

We do get abandoned cars but usually only when stolen.

Don’t you have companies that do that in the US?

[Grrr]

@ZenBeam

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.

Aand.. I heard tell.. If you’re broke and need a couple of extra days to get the cash or resources together to get your car off the highway; you can get some white shoe polish and write: "IN TOW’ over the windows.

This will buy you an extra three or four days.

[VOW]

On VERY busy freeways in SCal, where lane widths have been repeatedly reduced and shoulders narrowed to accommodate more cars, leaving an abandoned vehicle can actually be deadly. There are tow drivers who have the contracts with CalTrans, and dispatch informs them of a road hazard. It’s critical to remove these vehicles immediately during peak traffic hours, during inclement weather, or during construction.
~VOW

[Bijou_Drains]

knew a guy who had a car that was always breaking down. One day it broke down and he parked it in a front of a house and gave the car for free to the people who lived there. They were nervous so they called the cops and he went back later and signed the car over to them legally.

[Thylacine]

I often see cars grouped on median strips etc. the morning after a random breath test site (“booze bus”) has been at that location. My guess is that a proportion of the single cars left around are due to cops removing the right to drive immediately from the people who were in them for whatever reason.

[Absolute]

I hit a deer not so long ago on a county road in my brand-new SUV. I was able to pull safely onto the shoulder, but some of the plastic bumper components had gotten jammed into the wheel well and I did not want to drive it.

I wanted to call my trusted mechanic to get a body shop recommendation before having it towed anywhere, but it was around 11 PM. I called my insurance and they said if they towed it immediately they would take it to one of their “in-network” shops, and it was unclear if they would pay to tow it again after that. I called the sheriff and they said it would be fine to leave it on the road overnight as long as it was not blocking traffic.

So I called a friend to pick me up and left it there until the next afternoon, when I went out with the insurance tow truck to collect it.

The damage was to the passenger side, so anyone driving by would just see a shiny brand-new SUV sitting on the side of a deserted country road.