Dash cam ownership comes with one major caveat: It can capture things other drivers do, but it also records stupid things that you do.
I did a very stupid thing on Wednesday.
NSFW Language
I was having a pretty good day before my car smashed into the garage door. I was ahead of schedule with my writing, I picked up some greeting cards while successfully dodging holiday crowds, and Staples finally sent me the $100 rebate they owed me for the laptop I purchased in October. I also had a boat load of Burger King in tow and was looking forward to trying out the Impossible Whopper. I pulled into my driveway and noticed some packages by my front door and thought: “Better go get those!” Of course, there was no need for me to get them at that exact moment. They weren’t running away. I could have just uh, “Focused” on getting my car into the garage.
“This is my life now.”
But that’s not what happened. I happily exited my car to grab the packages. I completely ignored the chimes designed to warn owners that something is up. And I failed to act quickly enough to prevent my car from bumping into the garage door. What the hell is wrong with my brain? Beats me. I did spend the previous hour shoveling ice off my driveway and I didn’t eat breakfast that morning. Perhaps that contributed to my stupidity. In any event, it could have been much worse. I could have been seriously injured. The car could have smashed through the door and gone into the garage. The car could have been more seriously damaged too.
Thankfully, none of that happened. Although the car did sustain some minor damage when the handle rubbed against the bumper. That means it’s officially entered Stage 2 on David Saunders’ Car Life Cycle categorization system. These are fairly deep scratches. But aside from some paint transfer that can definitely be buffed out, that’s all that happened to the car. I will address the scratches in the spring.
As for the door, it sustained enough damage to prevent it from opening. The wood on the bottom section is broken in some areas and the wheel that guides the door along the track is no longer connected to the track. The door also has a bit of a curve to it now. But the damage isn’t severe enough to warrant immediate replacement and we don’t even have to repair anything right now. Besides, the doors are 40 years old. They probably should be replaced anyway. Which is what we’re going to do in the spring. I’ll pay for half the cost. Unfortunately, my car gets the raw end of the deal, as it now has to spend its time freezing its butt off outside.
I do want to change gears a bit to address something that’s frequently discussed in our comments section. Modern safety features are often derided for being unnecessary. I really have no excuse for what happened, but a forward collision system would have most definitely prevented the car from smacking into the door, or worse. An electronic shifter would have also compensated for my ineptitude because most of them automatically shift the car into park when the door is opened. No human is perfect 100 percent of the time. Safety systems save us from ourselves. Just something to keep in mind.
What have I learned from this experience? The forward creep functionality works pretty well, even on a small slope. Garage door openers probably prevent a lot of people from doing what I did. And…that’s about it.
My Certificate of Stupidity from the Society of Schmucks is set to arrive any day now.
My favorite garage door story:
One day my friend backed his Volvo wagon out of his garage, not realizing that the door wasn’t fully open.
His son had raised the door to go outside but was too lazy to open it all the way.
My friend saw daylight in his rearview mirror, so he backed out, and realized his mistake only when the bottom of the door hit the roof of his car.
He went into the house and dragged his son out to help him repair the garage door.
They unbolted the damaged bottom section of the door.
Of course, a sectional garage door (like Edward’s) has powerful springs which counterbalance the weight of ALL of the sections.
Once the men detached the bottom section, they watched the other sections rise up as if by magic, roll across the overhead tracks, and plop one-by-one on top of the poor old Volvo.
Those garage door springs are nothing to be trifled with. One of mine broke and it sounded like a shotgun blast going off. They are very powerful and can kill or injure if you don’t know what you’re doing.
The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree!
The 2019 Chrysler Pacifica allows Auto-Park when door is opened to be turned off easily (not just temporarily overridden) by a button on the dash.
Stuff happens. The first ding is the best because you will have it for the longest. That’s what my dad once said.
I gotta admit I laughed a lot more during that video than I probably should have. Thanks for being brave enough to share, Ed!
Me too. At least Ed can now say that he had two Whoppers in one day but only one of them tasted good. 🙂
Bummer. I used to live in a house with a huge old maple tree that had grown up against the concrete at the end of my narrow driveway. I cut too short entering the driveway in my 61 Thunderbird and put a big-old scrape/dent in the right side quarter panel. Doooh! The red paint and straight panels were about the only decent parts of the car. Oops.
I am still rocking a 1950s vintage heavy old wood garage door. One by one my neighbors are replacing theirs with those modern thin ones that any burglar could get through with a pair of Harbor Freight tinsnips. My garage door guy who replaces a big torsion spring every few years tells me that those old doors eventually wear out, but I disagree. They will rot, they will break when hit by a car and the hardware will loosen and fall out if you are not careful, but I can’t see them wearing out if they are maintained.
I am wondering if you could manage a temporary repair with some big fat bolts and a crowbar. If the track is not bent the multi-piece door ought to be fixable with some patience and a big enough hammer. Or maybe that is just my mechanical optimism talking.
Regarding your 60-year-old garage door, I grew up in a 1930s-era house with the heaviest, thickest garage door I’ve ever seen. After my father saw me once turning around in the driveway a little too quick, and getting a little to close to the garage door, he threatened to have me drawn and quartered if I ever hit the door, since it was effectively irreplaceable. That threat worked, and thankfully I’m still alive. If not hit by someone, I’m sure that old garage door will outlast us all.
We have similar wood doors from that era, and I’m sure as hell not going to be replacing them on my watch with those tinny ones! They are highly repairable. I bet Ed’s door just popped some hardware screws in the back and maybe needs a section or two replaced. Of course, who’s going to build a new wood section, except yourself?
I’ll give a fourth vote for keeping the old door. You could spend thousands on new doors and they still won’t be as good as the old ones. The damage doesn’t look very bad in the video. Replace some broken or pulled-out screws. Get the rollers back in the tracks. Gorilla glue and screws for any broken or separated wood. Even if there’s a few rotten spots, modern wood epoxies like those made by Abatron can do wonders.
Garage doors really don’t wear out. Keep them painted, grease the rollers, maybe replace a little hardware here and there, and they could last a lifetime.
Newer doors are much better in certain climates. We’re in upstate New York, so modern, insulated doors will help keep the house warmer in the winter. We’re going with new doors specifically for that reason.
Fair enough. I’m a southern boy, that “winter” thing didn’t occur to me.
Just wait until you get a lot older.
These youthful lapses will seem quaint by comparison.
I believe I had a youthful lapse on the 14th when we were going to get our Christmas tree. There’s this tree farm in our area where we usually park at the entrance & guys with John Deere tractors pulling retired tandem-axle trailers give us a ride farther down the path to help us select our tree. Well, just this one time none of the tractors were running so we drove down there–me driving my ’05 Astro with the 3rd-row seat folded down & a LIFETIME folding table mounted behind it to allow a flat loading surface–to go get the tree ourselves. We went in my brother’s Subaru Forester last year.
Everything was going well until we began to leave. The path through most of this place is 1-way only, so that meant having to go a LITTLE off the main road to turn around. I found this *nice* open field with no trees where it shouldn’t have been a problem, only to discover it was actually a small downward hill with the grass still wet from all the rain we’ve been getting. By the time I realized my mistake, the van’s wheels were already spinning & almost got us stuck; there are AWD Astros out there but mine isn’t of them. After getting the van pointed straight from turning around, it actually WAS moving if only a little bit, but trying to go any farther back up the hill was going to be a tall order without help which shortly arrived in the form of 2 of the farm’s workers. They along with me helped push the Astro with Dad driving until we got back to flat ground–no other surprises after that. When pushing I noticed the left rear wheel spinning along with the right one meaning the limited-slip diff was trying to do its thing, but negating the effort was the age of the tires which STILL need replacing (same ones from when I bought the van).
It wasn’t a TOTAL disaster & plenty of people have gotten stuck in WORSE situations with 4×4 vehicles, but I learned that day to never try turning around on a wet hill. Both the Astro & my 2011 Ranger need new tires soon, and this will be addressed in the coming year. All-terrains are high on my priority list. 🙂
Ed speaks French! Who knew? Bummer but it could have been significantly worse, and you are correct, modern safety systems in anything, not just cars, are completely unnecessary and useless until they are needed.
Oh, your new jacket looks quite cozy, too. 🙂
You don’t need any of newfangled safety gizmos, just use ya good ol’ parking brake! I’ve tried it in my ’11 MkZephyr hybrid and it works as designed, even if you leave it in gear on a slope.
My personal experience with Fords is that applying the emergency brakes is no guarantee that the car won’t roll away.
My current car, a Crown Victoria, will not allow the car to move backwards while the emergency brakes are on, but it has no trouble allowing the car to not just roll but to get up to cruising speeds if you move forward with the brakes on.
My old Ranger was the reverse. If I parked, and left it in neutral with the emergency brakes on it would roll backwards down the smallest slopes and even putting it in gear was no guarantee that the truck would be where you left it when you came back. I learned to never park anywhere that truck could roll into a nearby car.
On your Crown Victoria something isn’t installed correctly if they work in revers and not forward. and they are probably out of adjustment. Because they aren’t service brakes they are not self adjusting so they also need some period adjustment which no one ever does.
That would make sense since I seem to remember that they did work correctly at one point.
I have had 2 instances now when I suddenly noticed that red dashboard warning that comes on when you engage the emergency brakes was on. Luckily I see it before I have gone more than a mile or two.
I also realized that these were none adjusting brakes, so I use the e-brakes sparingly/only when really needed…and in flat as a pancake Florida that is almost never.
I should mention that it is probably time to have the parking brake shoes replaced. The factory ones are bonded and over time the glue will fail or rust will creep in under the glue and the shoe will come loose. What happens next depends. Apparently it happeded while in motion on our Mounatineer and when I went to do the rear brakes I found no shoe but a lot of dust on one side. On my Daughter’s Crown Vic it happened when she released the parking brake and then tried to back out of the driveway. The shoe became wedged and the car didn’t want to go backwards. That happened when they were about a dozen years old. I am going to be doing them on my Pickup when I do the rear pads and rotors as it is an 06 and with a manual trans they are really important.
+1 scoutdude. If it’s anything like my Cougar there’s probably an adjuster where the cables split off that needs to be adjusted periodically. On mine there’s a clip you need to pull down and when you do a high tension spring automatically takes up any slack in the cable system.
Admiration for anyone willing to share human foible. The upside, of course, is that no one was hurt.
I’ll admit to two of these with my 1980 Pinto (stick), forgetting to set parking brake and reverse not “holding.”
1) Parked on the street: rolled about 100 feet down gentle slope and took out neighbor’s mailbox.
2) Parking lot at retail strip: after shopping, couldn’t find my car where I was sure I’d parked it, and eventually noticed it at least 100 feet away on downslope. Very lucky that there’d been nothing in its path—-lesson cheaply learned. Could easily have turned tragic.
Haven’t had a car with a stick since–kinda skittish now.
Check back with us on that one… true Stage 2 status occurs when we keep procrastinating things like “addressing scratches” — which seem to often happen with my own cars.
Thanks for being brave enough to share this story with us!
It wouldn’t exactly be hard for the seat sensor to tell the ABS braking system to clamp up when the car is in Drive and no one is in the seat. Sounds like a 10 minute software patch; well, that is if it had an integrated software like a Tesla. But even then…
Paul – quite seriously this sounds good but it is the kind of thing that greatly reduces the chance that today’s cars will ever stay on the road long enough to achieve curbside classic status. The multiplexed electrical systems in use are going to be real nightmares as they age. My 2013 BMW was involved in a trivial parking lot incident where another car pushed in the corner of the rear bumper cap. The kind you fix by pumping up a deflated volleyball to pop out the plastic. Nothing. However since the car was new and the other guy paying I took it to the body shop. They just popped on a new cover. However when I got the car back, neither the air conditioner nor the stereo worked. The body guy told me his guys must have left a connection loose under the rear bumper cover (!?) – had me take it to the dealer for reconnection and bring him the bill. $1100.
My 2019 is much more complex among other surprise features the rear doors -automatically- go into childproof mode if a child seat is installed. The seat heaters go on at a preset temp but only if the seat is occupied. The list of sensor-run features goes on and on, and all the circuits are multiplexed.
I would be kind of hesitant to have one that automatically applies the brakes if my 100 pound wife shifts her weight wrong in the driver’s seat. I’m old enough to remember the 1974 fiasco when cars wouldn’t start if the car thought the seatbelts weren’t fastened.
I’m not exactly a Luddite and I enjoy all these feature I’ve got….but you can be darn sure this car will be gone from my garage before the warranty expires.
I think enough safety features could be added to Paul’s suggestion to insure more reliability and redundancy. Car in Drive plus open door plus no load on seat plus speed zero or less than 1-2 mph. And regarding Lokki’s comment about a forgotten connection disabling AC and stereo, even on a low-tech car a connection behind the bumper could impact brake/tail/reverse/signal lights, or trailer connections, with much more safety ramifications. I did forget to put our Prius in Park once when stepping out, after the IC motor had shut off and it was silent. Nothing happened other than a cacophony of alerts and lights. I never made that mistake again.
There are a number of cars that will put the car in park if the driver’s door is opened and the vehicle is not in park. Having it tied to the door, not the seat is the way to go, by the time you’ve got enough weight off the seat for it to react you could be half way out the door. Of course to do that you need an electronic shifter, or maybe just an electronic parking brake.
And you certainly don’t need “Tesla integrated software” to do it, or make the change quickly, if there is hardware on the vehicle to make it happen. Virtually all the modules in a modern car are in constant communication over a common bus or two. They are all speaking the same language on that bus which allows them to use the same sensors for multiple modules. What ever module that sensor is connected to puts that info on the BUS for all to use. If there are two buses in the vehicle you often have a gateway module that will direct selected messages from one bus to the other.
At least the airbags didn’t deploy! Scratches are cheaper than a new dashboard, steering wheel, seat upholstery and the airbag modules that are installed in them.
My mother was a night owl. I stopped over to her house at 11pm to see her because I knew that she’d be up. She was and she was baking but she needed butter. I offered to run up to the store to get some if I could take her car because I was low on gas and there was no gas station in that direction. She had a new 1984 Ford Tempo with an automatic on the floor. My ride was an F150 with a 4 speed on the floor. Back then I still associated automatics with column shifters. Well you guessed it, I came out of the store and the car was gone! WTF? Across the parking lot, several hundred feet away I could see a Ford Tempo that looked like hers. As I got closer to it I could se that it was hers, but how did it get over here? Just then a lady drove up and asked if that was my car and she told me that it slowly rolled over here all by itself. A man in a pickup truck saw it and stopped it and put a block of wood behind the tire! I had shut it off and left it in gear like it was a manual transmission. If the guy in the pick up is reading this 35 years later I’d like to thank you for allowing me to return Ma’s car back to her without a scratch.
HE&N, I laughed at your parking lot story ’cause it’s so much like mine just above (likewise 1980s). Thanks for joining me/us in the confessional today!
but a forward collision system would have most definitely prevented the car from smacking into the door, or worse. An electronic shifter would have also compensated for my ineptitude because most of them automatically shift the car into park when the door is opened. No human is perfect 100 percent of the time. Safety systems save us from ourselves. Just something to keep in mind.
Manual transmission would have prevented this entirely 🙂
Many forward collision systems don’t work when the vehicle isn’t at a minimum speed. So I wouldn’t be so sure that would have saved you. What would have worked is the system where the car goes into park if the door is opened and the car isn’t already in park. Mercedes for example does this. Of course that doesn’t’ work with a fully mechanical shift system.
I’m betting the door can be put back in serviceable condition. When the door flexes like that the wheels are able to come out of the track because they only have a retaining lip on the inside/bottom. So unbolt the wheel tilt it back in the track and bolt it back into position. If the carriage bolts have pulled through you may need to replace them with a standard bolt and a washer. You can shore up the broken stiles with a strip of plywood, 1×2 or metal angle attached to the inside.
I’ve never run into a garage door but I do sometimes park VERY close to insure the tail end of my Tacoma doesn’t obstruct people walking by on the sidewalk; our driveway is very short. And I have the same kind of hex screws holding on my front license plate as on Edward’s Focus. On my truck, those are the most forward items and they will leave nice stripes on the garage door when you hit the button. And I’ve done that more than once. My door is wooden … or at least a primarily wood-based product.
Never ran into a garage door but I did come close to knocking the back wall out of my parents’ garage. The much younger me liked to get into the family car and pretend that I was driving. My father never took the key out of the car at home but at least I knew enough not to mess with that. What I didn’t realize was that the starter button (this was a 1950 Ford and before the starter was integral with the key) was live all of the time. I found out that if the three speed manual tranny is in low and one pushes the starter button, the car will leap forward and quite well at that. In any case the Ford jumped forward until it contacted the back wall of the garage. The interior of the garage wasn’t finished so thankfully there was no drywall to damage. Several of the 2X4 studs were cracked but not displaced, and the bumper of the Ford wasn’t even scratched. I quickly abandoned my driving for the day and moved on to something else. Either my father never noticed the cracked studs or he just decided to let it go but nothing was ever said to me about the incident.
Now is there a safety feature to prevent side swiping your own mailbox when backing up? A PDR guy came to my office to address the very obvious dent beautifully and I took care of the scratch with touch up bc/clear and 3000 sand paper plus buffing.
My Focus
Took my Golf Sportwagen to indy shop last month for winter tire changeover. Car was up on hydraulic lift at comfortable height to loosen lug nuts. Mechanic asked me to get lug nut cap cover removal tool (!) from tool kit. Opened hatch for that, left it open … then asked whether they could also do oil change. Before I knew it, car was being raised higher… STOP I yelled, too late, open hatch struck open roll up garage door. Some deep scratches in hatch, still waiting for touch up paint!
I did a $900 boo-boo that involved my truck, a bookcase and a not-fully-raised roll-up door on the machine shed. My certificate is proudly framed in the shop!
“I could have been seriously injured.”
A definite possibility. When I was in high school one of our neighbors pulled her (much admired by me) 1964 Grand Prix into the driveway and got out to open the garage. As too often was the case, she had been drinking way too much and thought the car was in N but it was in D. The big Pontiac pinned her leg to the door and it had to be removed due to the severe injury.
Glad you’re okay, Ed. Hope you can fix the door so the Focus does not have to be outside all winter. The burger sounds great and a better way to end the incident than the one in my sad story.
An Aerostar with the hatch open will probably clear an open garage door. The rear wiper however will probably not!
I thought of that autobody shop advertisement – someone has a crash, and the first thing out of their mouth is “F_____” replaced by “Fix auto!”
We’ve all done stupid stuff from time to time. Glad you are none the worse for wear.
Don’t feel too bad.
I got my 2018 Hyundai Elantra in Sept 2018. A brand new car with the full new car smell still wafting about in the interior. I signed the paperwork and drove it away. 2 hours later, I park it in front of my home and scrape the lower air dam against the curb which put a nice scratch in it. only 2 hours of ownership and I damaged the car.
It was entirely my fault because I used to pull up so far into my parking space with the truck(which was higher)
I haven’t made the dashcam leap yet – it would certainly save lots of profane language and my questionable musical tastes for posterity though. I’ll never forget my car is still in drive and may creep forward (thanks, manual transmission!) but I did back it into a concrete surround that surrounded the multi-car driveway at the quadplex I used to live in. Ironically, I just bought a backup camera I saw on sale when i was at Costco today. Neat design, solar powered and cordless for easy installation, but I don’t see a good place for the screen it includes so it may wind up getting returned.
The Impossible Whopper by the way is fantastic – tastes better than the regular one IMO with a better texture. I’d never guess it wasn’t meat if I didn’t know. It’s still a highly processed food and only slightly healthier than the beef version though.
If more idiots would use a parking brake these things wouldn’t happen. It should be a habit.