Steve wrote:
> Logan Shaw > wrote:

>>Call me crazy, but I don't quite get why it's worthwhile to buy
>>insurance for this in the first place.
>>At the worst, I can imagine needing a tow perhaps twice a year

> Yikes, maybe twice a lifetime would be a more reasonable worst-case.
> How many people here have ever had to be towed?

Three times that I can recall. In high school, I had an Olds Cutlass
that my parents gave me. It was serviceable, but built in 1980,
pretty much the low point of all time for GM. The car had a
rotor (in the distributor, that is) had a nasty habit of cracking
in two if it got slightly too hot. Pushing the car too hard could
cause it to get slightly too hot, where "pushing too hard" meant
cruising along the freeway at the same speed as regular traffic.
One time I was driving about 50 mph, and the engine just died.
Since I was on a busy section of freeway (and did not yet know
that was the problem), there was no real way to get the car out
of there.

Second time, same Olds Cutlass. Had had the engine rebuilt a
few years before. Apparently the rebuilder wasn't that hot[1].
One day (on my way to show up for my first day of work at a new
job, naturally), the crankshaft just broke in two while I was
driving down the highway. (Actually, I had it towed twice: once
to the service station, and once from there to the car dealer
that got it when I traded it in on something more reliable.)

Third time was totally my fault. I knew it was time to replace
the timing belt on my Toyota, but I kept putting it off. I
really was planning on doing it, but I didn't get around to
it until after having to have it towed. Whoops.

So, all in all, one of them should have been avoided, and one
of them could have been avoided if I'd known more about who
not to take the car to, which I didn't.

- Logan

[1] The day after we took it down to them to have them start
work, I was talking to a classmate whose family owned a
lawnmower repair business. I told him where we'd chosen
to take the car, and he said something like, "You took it
to where? You're going to regret that." And he was right.
I don't know why I didn't think to ask him where to take it,
since he did basically grow up working on small engines...