I am sure that since 1949, an awful lot of ’49 Fords have rear ended other cars. After all, Ford made over a million of them and (according to Wiki) actually slightly out-produced Chevrolet for the 1949 model year. But ’49 Fords are not all that common on the ground anymore, particularly here in the salty midwest.
So, you can imagine my surprise when, after idling through a rush hour traffic jam, I got to the cause of the problem – the poor driver of the nice 1949 Ford was unable to stop quickly enough and rear ended a modern Explorer. Fortunately for me (and for you), traffic was moving slowly enough for me to un-holster the trusty Blackberry and capture what has to be a pretty rare occurrence.
The bad news is that the Blackberry camera takes a few seconds to cycle between shots, and traffic started up again before I was able to catch the front of the ’49. Let’s just say that the car (and it’s spinner grille) needs more than a little dental work. Was the problem the drum brakes? Bias ply tires? Or just driver inattention?
Traffic accidents are a fact of life. They have been since shortly after the invention of the horseless carriage. The actuaries out there can tell us that a certain percentage of every model will, at some point, be damaged or destroyed in a collision. We who love old cars like to think that those that have survived long enough to be pampered classics will avoid this fate, but this is just not true. It is a sad fact that a very small number of the coveted old ones will meet their ends in wrecks and garage fires every year.
As if to prove my point, the very day after these photos were taken, I was treated to another sight – a beautiful 1969 or 70 Electra 225 coupe riding on a flatbed truck with its entire front end smashed much worse than this one. Unfortunately, there was no time to photograph that one for you. An accident with a modern car is bad enough, but there are only so many clean, original, perfectly fitting parts out there for AARP-elligible cars.
Fortunately, I have never had to experience this firsthand. Although I did once see one of the beautiful original wheelcovers on my 20 year old ’59 Plymouth Fury smashed before my eyes. John at my old neighborhood gas station was mounting snow tires on the rims. His habit was to put the hubcap on the floor while the car was on the lift. He would remove the lugs and put them in the hubcap. I think the reverse threaded lug bolts (not nuts) must have thrown him, because suddenly the tire and wheel came loose and dropped about four feet onto the beautiful conically shaped piece of anodized aluminum. Ouch. Certainly not a catastrophe. But there was one less pristine wheelcover from 1959 left in the world.
I suspect that with all of our readers, at least somebody has had the kind of day that this ’49 Ford’s driver had, where your very clean and straight old pride-and-joy, that had managed to go years and years without much more than a door ding, got damaged. Are you up to telling us about it?
Actually that is a 03 or 04 Mercury Mountaineer Premier that functioned as the stop for that poor Ford.
I can’t say I’ve every really wrecked one of my old cars, though I’ve certainly added to the patina of a few.
I thought the exact same thing – Mountaineer not Explorer.
We’re a strange breed, who notice things like that right away…lol.
You are right, of course. Me – I couldn’t take my eyes off the ’49.
Ouch indeed. Let’s just say when I’m driving my drum-braked F100, I make sure I’m leaving enough room, especially with a load. But then, is there really enough room, all the time? If someone stands on their brakes…
I hate to say it, but the flathead driver looks pretty young. I did ding up a couple of noses before I got my ADD under control. I’m very easily distracted. The last time was that old beater Camry Rent-A-Wreck I wiped out in Hawaii: “Oh, look at that beautiful beach, Paul……….crash!!”
Not ever getting distracted is hard, but rear ending someone every twenty years or so helps.
Never owned a true classic. Closest I came to was when, in 1981, I owned a 1964 Ford Galaxie. It was a Texas car; a beater; I was in Texas and without a lot of money. Without ANY money…
I was running water in the radiator. I couldn’t afford Cokes for lunch; I couldn’t afford Prestone for that car. Suffice to say, I was running it with Poor People’s Insurance…”Ain’t got none, boss…”
In Houston, freezes are uncommon…but the winter of 1981-1982 was the coldest in 17 years. We had snow on Christmas Eve, which delighted the Mexican workers at the construction company I was indentured to.
It also froze that night. I’d drained the radiator; but of course, half the coolant supply lie below the water-pump line, and froze and broke the block.
Bad news. Much as I hated to lose what I knew, even then, could have become a Curbside Classic (no rust, LOTS of patina) I managed to screw a scummy Pay-Here used-car dealer with it. And get what turned out to be my model Beater-With-A-Heart, my 1973 Pinto Squire.
I kept that Pinto for five years. Damned dumbest thing I ever did, was satisfy my old man in selling it for $450 to clear the garage.
But…back to the question.
Said Pinto was the result of a rear-end collision with a “post-lady” with no insurance (me, having escaped that trap, I waxed wroth at her irresponsibility!) She banged up my rear gate; and no, there was no rust-free rear gate to be had for a Pinto in 1982 Cleveland. So, my poor Texas Squire, which I named “Blazing Saddles”…had no comfort for its ouch. Ever.
Years pass…and again, I had a Southern car. A Southwestern Jeep…a rust-free Wrangler with a CJ front clip.
I had a Jeep mechanic who tricked Jeeps for off-road use. I brought mine in one Friday afternoon for a minor problem; his Jeep club was gathering at his “rock-pile” where he’d test upgrades.
His Jeep club was composed of climbers, not mudders. Jeepers know the difference.
Anyway…they politely oooh’d at my Wrangler’s CJ trappings; and then I was invited to take the “easy” course. Invited as in, “yer a pussy if you can’t even walk your mall-rated streeter over those rocks.” Well…I know how to drive a snowplow, so I put it in Low and had at it.
Halfway up the second rise, I lost traction, slid backwards, and into a tree. A big tree.
Tree didn’t give. Jeep did.
The beauty of having a utility rig is, you don’t need to worry about tailfin creases. It broke the taillight off and put a big crease in the left rear corner. I got my prybar out, broke off the taillight and pried out the sheetmetal as best I could.
And that was that. Bought a hole-saw and mounted truck LED rear lights. The ripples were there right until I sold it.
But it still hurts to see a car you love hurt that way….
The winter of 81/82 was my first one in Houston. The next year we had hurricane Alicia and another cold winter. People down here still talk about that. I live north of Houston in Montgomery county. Two lane blacktop and that’s probably why I can keep a car. Unlike Paul, I have never learned to control my ADD.
Now that’s sad. And no, I’m not talking about the mountaineer, that thing could be rear ended by a train for all I care! Hopefully with no one inside. I guess four drum brakes does not cut it anymore in today’s traffic?
Photos below shows what happened to my poor Nissan Laurel when I rear ended a Subaru Legacy wagon 18 months ago. I was in an unfamiliar part of Auckland city here in New Zealand, reached for my map book and looked up to see the traffic had stopped for a red light. Oops. The Legacy’s towbar took most of the impact – you can see where the towbar went in under my RH headlight and above the bumper rail. The bonnet only bent because the top radiator/headlight crossmember support bent and twisted – as the bonnet release is on that support it brought the bonnet with it.
My insurance company said the bent crossmember meant the car needed to be written off. I and my repairer protested vigorously that it would be incredibly wasteful to write off an otherwise immaculate and structurally sound car. But the insurance insisted the entire car was structurally unsound as a result and wrote it off and de-vinned it…
I bought the ‘wreck’ back from them and spent the insurance payout having it repaired and repainted (and had money left over!). We have strict rules here for repairing and re-vinning an insurance-write-off car, so an authorised certifier needed to first inspect the car on a laser chassis-alignment machine, and then again at each subsequent step of the repair. I felt completely vindicated when the chassis-alignment and certifier reports proved that aside from the bent crossmember and cosmetic bumper/bonnet damage, the car was completely undamaged and structurally sound. In fact, they decided the write-off had been unnecessary, so rather than issue a new vin number, they simply reinstated the original one, making for a nice clean title. I know a 15 year old diesel Nissan isn’t remotely a curbside classic, but if the insurance companies are that wasteful over a relatively late-model ex-JDM car, imagine what they could be like to a genuine classic like that ’49…
And yes, I took responsibility for my mistake, and my insurance company repaired the Legacy. No I don’t use map books now, I have a nice safe GPS. And 18 months and 90,000km later the Laurel’s still trucking along like nothing happened.
Probably the result of a failed single circuit master cylinder, which is located under the car in a most inaccessible spot.
Aye, know that from my personal experience, it’s quite spooky nowadays to drive an all original 1950s car with drum brakes all around and bias ply tires even here in Russia, an I can imagine just how much more difficult it should be in the US, with much tighter traffic / high powered cars to keep up with!
However, I wonder, how that piece of… plastic crap they call “bumpers” today could survive such an accident and even cause this amount of damage to the poor ’49 ? Surely the problem was, the Merc’s bumper being too high compared to the ’49’s one; actually, the ’49 seems to be lowered quite a bit, if my eyes are not lying, which also could be partially responsible for such unfortunate implications (beauty comes at a price, indeed!).
Pity about your hubcap, too, though I’d rather the (somewhat cleaner looking IMO) ’57s.
My last rear-ender was about 1978. I was a senior in high school, driving my 67 Galaxie 500 convertible home from work at 9 pm. It was cold out. For some reason, I looked down as I turned on the heat. As I looked up, instead of the usual 2 or 3 cars stopped at a familiar traffic light, there were about 6 or 7. Crap. I locked ’em up and the bias ply tires slid on the salt residue of a wintertime city street.
My Ford nosed down and hit the rear of a 71 Skylark. A little dimple on the Skylark’s bumper. The owner said “don’t worry about it.” But the entire leading edge of the hood was bent under, the grille was mangled, and the passenger side potmetal headlight surround was cracked.
The good news was that I went to my favorite junkyard to find a freshly delivered 67 LTD 4 door with a perfect, shiny hood painted the same color as mine. “I’ll take that one”, I said. Swapped hoods in the parking lot, and bought the grille and headlight door, and marvelled at my skills in collision repair.
The brakes are sure an issue today. I remember in the late 80s, Mrs. JPC was getting leery of going for rides in the 29 Model A. Everyone today assumes that you can stop as well as they can, so they pull out in front of you without thinking. More than once, I had to stand on the brake pedal (butt off seat) while pulling on the handbrake lever (second set of little tiny brake shoes) and hoping that my meager brakes would not overcome the grip of the skinny tires. If you like an adreneline rush, you should try panic stops in a 1920s car.
Try panic stopping a mid seventies Cadillac in 2012 rush hour traffic!
+1!!!!! The disc/drum brakes on my ’70 DeVille function as designed, but the car is a beached whale, and it takes a while to stop. Most modern vehicles stop much shorter. I wish other drivers would realize this.
Driving the Caddy in urban/suburban traffic has unfortunately become something I dred. I leave a gap between the car in front of me because I might need it. All too often, some fool will move into the gap and hit their brakes. It is only a matter of time before I rear end someone hard enough to put my 5 piece heavy steel bumper in someone’s back seat. My dear old caddy isn’t designed to crumple on impact.
I was driving a 64 Continental back in the mid 90’s when the brake line bled out on me. I lost all brake power and rather than slam into the tiny japanese subcompact infront of me I slid between it and a flat bed truck in the lane next to it. Luckily the flat bed truck had some sort of projecting metal element that caught my passenger side front fender. It sliced a gash in my slab side that was a cross between what possibly took out the Titanic and a soup can lid. The flat bed was unharmed, and very forgiving. The light went green and I drove out of the intersection and into a dirt field, where I managed to turn off the car and let friction bring the beast to a rest before plunging into a flood control embankment. Luckily I had some extra brake fluid in the trunk(It was a slow leak) and I got her home safely. To this day I stil have nightmares about trying to stop that way underbraked Continental. I wake up in a sweat with both legs rigid as she regularly took 2 feet to bring to a stop. But that ugly scar stayed there til I sold the thing to a poor kid who came knocking on my door “I want to fix it up…” I smiled took the money, handed the title over and said good bye, for ten years before I was that kid.
I brought my immaculate 1962 Buick special wagon with white over blue two tone paint to a shop in San Diego to replace my dead brake master cylinder. As it was being lowered off the flat bed I was telling the owner of the shop to push it into the bay and to have all attendents turn their belt buckles away. I was quite vocal about the fact that the brakes were completely inoperable. He assured me he would when one of the attendents jumped in the drivers seat, started it up and slammed it into drive with a liberal amout of gas. As my lovely Special smoothly pulled away I heard a moment of panic from the fellow and the grinding sound of him jamming it into reverse. With me shouting at him and running to pull him from the car he put it back in drive, gave it the go pedal and swerved into the work bay. The car silently dissapeared from sight and what I heard next was this. The car traveling at close to 30mph and blowing reverse gear, shouting, toolboxes (5 foot tall ones) being shattered and the final crack and boom of my pride and joy snapping through a lift and smashing into a brick wall. I stood with my hand over my mouth as if I had just seen John Kennedy pulling a tire. “You are going to pay for that” I said quietly. Moments later my rage took over and I pretty much turned into a big green guy.
For the past few years there’s been a picture circulating where an errant woman driver in a late-model Lexus hit the gas instead of the brake and t-boned an immaculately restored ’67 Pontiac Lemans hardtop. I saw the pics- the passenger side door was pushed a foot and a half into the passenger compartment.
The ironic thing was it was at a local car show where this happened.
I’ve had a few accidents (glare/black ice and/or snow got me in trouble a few times, but that was before I was living in snow country.
My only rear-ender (as the perp) was on a commute into the west-side Chicago ghetto. The freeways weren’t convenient so I took Ogden Ave, which had 4 to 6 lanes. Traffic was rush-hour normal, with some lanes OK and others that sucked. I was already pretty distracted, since the night before my taillight wire shorted to the metal(!) wire-routing clip. In true Prince of Darkness fashion, the headlight switch blew to protect the 30A fuse. I thought I’d duck into the faster lane, but couldn’t find an opening. I did find a mid-60’s Galaxie (this was 72) and put a mile dent in his bumper. My MGB’s aluminum hood (or is it “aluminium bonnet:?) was spectacularly graunched, along with minor dents in the fender and a trashed headlight. The other guy said “screw it” and we went on. Needed a replacement hood, which left a couple of interesting adventures. MGBs were not common in Chicago area boneyards, so one guy thought I must have wanted one from his MG1100. I found the good one from a guy with a sweet MG-TC. More a show-queen than a CC, but it did make occasional runs to the local MacDonald’s.
A bit later, I was driving my mother’s 70 Catalina (equipped with a medium-duty trailer hitch) when I stopped quickly for a red in the middle of downtown. The guy behind me with the brand new LTD (about 2 miles on the clock) didn’t. His hood now read “L [space] D”. Poor guy. He did buy a new bumper for the Poncho. We didn’t bother with the trailer hitch. Poor bugger had Allstate, so he paid cash for our problems.
In January of 2004, my van was in the shop, so I had to drive my ’65 Chrysler for a week. While at the mall for a couple of hours a sudden freezing rain created a wonderful skating rink to drive home on.
The landing in the ditch was slow and soft enough that things were still ok, but before the tow truck arrived, an Escort wagon looped off the road in exactly the same spot and ended up with his rear bumper into my left front fender.
Eight years later the replacement quarter is still probably the best sheet metal on the whole car.
My avatar – my ’74 Ford Courier. Rear ended a lady in a green, early ’70s Fiat 124 convertible. Third Street – San Rafael – spring 1978. Light turns yellow 3rd and B street. She’s in front of me; I’m behind . . . not too close . . . we both react to the suddenly yellow light change by accelerating . . . but . . . suddenly . . . she decides to slam on her brakes. Not enough time with the four-drums-all-around Courier. Slam-O!
Crumpled her trunk lid, broke both her tailights and mangled her bumper. My grille broken, bumper twisted along with the valance pan and the left front fender and left headlight bent out/broken (but driveable). Didn’t make my day. Hood and right fender unscathed as I did try to swing to the left.
Getting to the meat of this story, like Paul said, in the times I have driven vintage machinery, I slow waaayyy down at intersections and give plenty of clearance to cars in front as compared to today’s cars, old drum brake vehicles and old sagging suspensions are like piloting ships – you “telegraph” your intentions and await the receipt of the orders to the brakes, suspension and transmission, much like a ship!! Bridge commands well in advance of the execution!!