Yay, I finally got my car back!

If you haven't heard the story already: On the 13th of Dec I was driving home on the Milan ring road. It was rush hour, so stop&go traffic. At a certain point traffic stopped again, I stopped, and so did the cars behind me. Then I saw a car in my rear-view mirror, skidding along between the lanes of traffic and not managing to stop. Somehow he missed several cars, but hit me hard enough to bounce me into the car in front. Nothing serious – no airbags – but all the crumple zones, well, crumpled.

This is where it gets weird: I checked on the car I had hit first, made sure they were OK, then while I was talking to the driver we saw the driver of the car that hit me with his two passengers walking towards us. We turned back to his wife, turned back again, and they were gone, leaving their running car abandoned in the middle of the Milan ring-road!

We naturally assumed the car was stolen and called the police, but when they arrived and ran the numbers it turned out to belong to a gypsy. These guys register hundreds of cars – quite literally; the policeman told me they found one guy with four hundred cars in his name! - and then anyone in the tribe can drive them. The guy who hit me may have been illegal, under age, without a licence, wanted for something else, drunk, high, or any or all of the above, so he ran off, but the car itself was legal and even insured.

It just meant a cold couple of hours going through police formalities at the roadside, then getting the car towed and picking up a rental (company car FTW!). What I was not expecting was for the repair process to drag out so long. While waiting for my own car, and driving various rentals, I have developed a Borat-esque attitude to gypsies…

As I said on Twitter:

That was actually a false alarm, as it turned out to be close to seven weeks. However, the rest of that prediction was spot-on. I got in my Beemer, adjusted the seat how I like it (as low as it goes) and already it felt like being in a Formula 1 car. I pootled along icy back-streets to the ring-road, and half-throttle in the merge lane felt like Mach 1. I have to admit I was grinning ear to ear with the joy of getting my own car back!

Fortunately I was keeping an eye on my speed, as the garage appeared to have reset some of the electronics, including my audible speed warning which goes off at 110% of the motorway limit (about right, given the Beemer's "optimistic" tach). I didn't really exercise the suspension or tyres, as I was on calls for most of the drive back, but that's going to be a job for the next time I'm driving back from a customer visit with no particular place to be in a hurry.

The weeks of rentals do give me an opportunity to review the two cars I had as successive replacements. Here are reviews of the Ford Fiestaand the Hyundai ix20.

Spoiler: neither of them can hold a candle to the BMW 320d.