- 3,770
- Brisbane, Australia
- Chameleon9000
So far, my experience with personal transportation has been comically unlucky, and extremely frustrating. This thread will aim to explore that with the power of comedic hindsight (as opposed to the boiling anger of the present), as well as to introduce my little car to the world of Gran Turismo planet. I will start off with the “car” bit, by introducing my little guy to you. Meet “brum brum”.
hes a 2016 DJ Mazda2 Ghenki, hes my first car, and I have had him for almost a year now. I love this little car, it has such a great and happy engine in it, so much fun to drive. It's definitely not perfect, its pretty unbalanced and the chassis really doesn't feel like it wants to have fun, but the engine sings, and that's what matters to me. However, this is what he looks like today.
As you can see, he has been crushed by a Hilux.
This is, however, kind of still an ongoing incident, as at the time of me writing this, it only happened a couple of hours ago. It is also the most recent event in a line of ridiculous things that have occurred to me that have prevented me from having consistent personal transport for more than a year now, so this is basically how we got here. It will also serve as my "members rides" post in future.
So without further ado, lets go back to the past and learn about my ridiculous luck.
Back in early 2018, me and my family decided to move inner city, and live the apartment life. Up until this point, I had been using a combination of lifts from my parents, and public transport to get around. My school, which I graduated from in 2016, was, without exaggeration, literally right next to my house, and my job took around about 30 mins to get to by walking and busing, so I never felt the need to get my license. Big mistake.
Here in QLD Australia, it takes at least one year to go from acquiring your learners license, to being able to drive your own car by yourself. Of course, being a naive and privileged kid, I waited until I needed to be able to drive by myself to get my learners license. One whole year of needing my license without having my licence. Moron.
Luckily, living inner-city meant that both my tertiary education campus and my workplace were within 20 minutes of bike riding from my home. But bikes mean exercise. Stuff exercise. So the solution to the problem was this thing:
This is “Scoot Scoot”, and you have probably noticed the naming pattern. Hes basically a Lotus of the electric scooter market: even weight distribution, extremely low centre of gravity and rear wheel drive.
Its actually a ton of fun, relatively quick for something that goes on a footpath and really nimble. It was glorious. For a solid 6 months, everything I could ever need was within 20 minutes, and the thing folds up to be pretty compact, fitting neatly in the luggage compartment of busses or trains, for everything outside of the city.
So I was having a great time. Right up until one day I got home from work to my mother telling me they'd bought a house out in rural brisbane, a solid hours worth of public transport from everything, and nearly two hours from my partners house.
This was pretty frustrating, but liveable I suppose. At least I could still ride the scooter to and from bus stations, which was awesome because both my house and my partners were a solid walk away from any stations. It was right about this time that the brisbane city council erroneously banned any low powered electric transportation devices from using public transport, without warning, and without reason.
The closest thing to a solid reason for this decision that I ever weened out of the poor customer complaints desk jockey was “lithium ion batteries are hazardous”, which makes close to no sense because every single passenger who uses their service carries a round a chunk of lithium in their pockets and there has never been any upheaval due to that. I even had one driver yell at me, telling me that my scooter was “likely to burn the bus down”, “Its a death trap”.
Okay, now public transport takes an hour and a half to get anywhere useful. At this point I was still a solid 6 months off my license, and I was obsessed with getting it. Rarely did I go a day without the burning desire to just drive my damn car to work, But I never did. Luckily my mother has a lot of spare time, so I got to drive to work a lot with her in the passenger seat, building my driving hours up to the point where I was going to easily complete the required number of experience hours within the one year period without faking a minute of it (which a very large number of learners don’t have the luxury of saying)
Skip forward a few months, and I have now made the decision to become fully independent from my parents. I found a cool little share-house back on the same street I used to live on, and even better, I'm eligible to get my license the same week as I move out. All sounds great right? Well, have you ever heard of SARS-Cov-2? Yeaaahhhh... So my license test was delayed 3 months, and the worst part is that all this happened, and I am not exaggerating, three days before my test was scheduled to take place. I was so close, only to have it just ripped away from me at the last second. Three days. Unbelievable. So now I am stuck in a share house with no other car owners, without a license for three months. At least I have the scooter right?
So the first day of me living here my scooter motor broke. It worked flawlessly for two years and then it broke the first day of me truly needing it. Alright. So, I take it to the nearest repair shop (which of course is ages away) and they say they will have it fixed in around 5 days. It took three weeks of course! And when I went to pick it up, they still hadn't properly fixed it. So it ended up costing me twice as much money, and twice as much time, and i was without personal transport for another month.
You might be thinking, what could possibly go wrong after all that? Well, I honestly have no idea how it happened, but when I got home i realized that I no longer had the charger for the scooter. I looked high and low through my house, checked my car a few hundred times, and called up the repair shop to see if they'd forgotten to give it back. They claimed they knew nothing of it, and that I never gave them a charger in the first place, but at this point I'd pretty much just given up trying, and just ubered to work and back for a good month. Eventually I realized that even when I do have my license, it will be good to have my scooter handy anyway, so I went and bought it a new charger at exuberant expense. One more month to my license though, so there's that.
At this stage of the whole ordeal, I had become extremely impatient with everything. I was basically under a continuous state of anxiety, hoping that the QLD government would finally re-open the license testing facilities. It did take almost three months since the initial closing, but finally, they spoke out and announced that license tests would resume. The best part is, because of my misfortune of having my test cancelled so close to the testing date, they gave me a high priority test, and allowed me to take it one day after it was re-opened. So now my anxiety is through the roof, as I haven't really done much driving practice for three straight months, and my test is in less than a week. I seriously couldn't sleep.
Despite all of that, on the 16th of June 2020, I finally, finally received my provisional driving licence, and was allowed onto the open roads without an accompanying driver.
On the 16th of July, exactly one month after receiving my license, my car was squashed.
At this point, I think its pretty safe to say that I was in no way the cause of the incident. I did everything correctly, I have a witness of the incident, and my insurance company is pretty confident that it will come back positive. However, I suspect that it will be at least one month before I get to drive my car again, as the insurance companies are still battling, and the car isn't in the best condition at the moment. But damn, what a journey. Just so many things have gone wrong for me in this regard. It's honestly quite hilarious in hindsight, it just seems so unlikely and stupid. Yes this is a very long-winded post which is essentially a glorified rant, but hey, I thought it would make a good tragic comedy.
So from now on, this thread will serve as my "members ride" post, and hopefully I'll be able to share some good luck in the future. But for now, thanks for reading.
hes a 2016 DJ Mazda2 Ghenki, hes my first car, and I have had him for almost a year now. I love this little car, it has such a great and happy engine in it, so much fun to drive. It's definitely not perfect, its pretty unbalanced and the chassis really doesn't feel like it wants to have fun, but the engine sings, and that's what matters to me. However, this is what he looks like today.
As you can see, he has been crushed by a Hilux.
The images here don't tell much if the story, as my car rolled back considerably from where the incident occurred, and he had moved his vehicle to prevent blocking of oncoming traffic. This thread isn't about playing the blame game, it's merely my silly little story.
This is, however, kind of still an ongoing incident, as at the time of me writing this, it only happened a couple of hours ago. It is also the most recent event in a line of ridiculous things that have occurred to me that have prevented me from having consistent personal transport for more than a year now, so this is basically how we got here. It will also serve as my "members rides" post in future.
So without further ado, lets go back to the past and learn about my ridiculous luck.
Back in early 2018, me and my family decided to move inner city, and live the apartment life. Up until this point, I had been using a combination of lifts from my parents, and public transport to get around. My school, which I graduated from in 2016, was, without exaggeration, literally right next to my house, and my job took around about 30 mins to get to by walking and busing, so I never felt the need to get my license. Big mistake.
Here in QLD Australia, it takes at least one year to go from acquiring your learners license, to being able to drive your own car by yourself. Of course, being a naive and privileged kid, I waited until I needed to be able to drive by myself to get my learners license. One whole year of needing my license without having my licence. Moron.
Luckily, living inner-city meant that both my tertiary education campus and my workplace were within 20 minutes of bike riding from my home. But bikes mean exercise. Stuff exercise. So the solution to the problem was this thing:
This is “Scoot Scoot”, and you have probably noticed the naming pattern. Hes basically a Lotus of the electric scooter market: even weight distribution, extremely low centre of gravity and rear wheel drive.
Its actually a ton of fun, relatively quick for something that goes on a footpath and really nimble. It was glorious. For a solid 6 months, everything I could ever need was within 20 minutes, and the thing folds up to be pretty compact, fitting neatly in the luggage compartment of busses or trains, for everything outside of the city.So I was having a great time. Right up until one day I got home from work to my mother telling me they'd bought a house out in rural brisbane, a solid hours worth of public transport from everything, and nearly two hours from my partners house.
This was pretty frustrating, but liveable I suppose. At least I could still ride the scooter to and from bus stations, which was awesome because both my house and my partners were a solid walk away from any stations. It was right about this time that the brisbane city council erroneously banned any low powered electric transportation devices from using public transport, without warning, and without reason.
The closest thing to a solid reason for this decision that I ever weened out of the poor customer complaints desk jockey was “lithium ion batteries are hazardous”, which makes close to no sense because every single passenger who uses their service carries a round a chunk of lithium in their pockets and there has never been any upheaval due to that. I even had one driver yell at me, telling me that my scooter was “likely to burn the bus down”, “Its a death trap”.
Okay, now public transport takes an hour and a half to get anywhere useful. At this point I was still a solid 6 months off my license, and I was obsessed with getting it. Rarely did I go a day without the burning desire to just drive my damn car to work, But I never did. Luckily my mother has a lot of spare time, so I got to drive to work a lot with her in the passenger seat, building my driving hours up to the point where I was going to easily complete the required number of experience hours within the one year period without faking a minute of it (which a very large number of learners don’t have the luxury of saying)
Skip forward a few months, and I have now made the decision to become fully independent from my parents. I found a cool little share-house back on the same street I used to live on, and even better, I'm eligible to get my license the same week as I move out. All sounds great right? Well, have you ever heard of SARS-Cov-2? Yeaaahhhh... So my license test was delayed 3 months, and the worst part is that all this happened, and I am not exaggerating, three days before my test was scheduled to take place. I was so close, only to have it just ripped away from me at the last second. Three days. Unbelievable. So now I am stuck in a share house with no other car owners, without a license for three months. At least I have the scooter right?
So the first day of me living here my scooter motor broke. It worked flawlessly for two years and then it broke the first day of me truly needing it. Alright. So, I take it to the nearest repair shop (which of course is ages away) and they say they will have it fixed in around 5 days. It took three weeks of course! And when I went to pick it up, they still hadn't properly fixed it. So it ended up costing me twice as much money, and twice as much time, and i was without personal transport for another month.
You might be thinking, what could possibly go wrong after all that? Well, I honestly have no idea how it happened, but when I got home i realized that I no longer had the charger for the scooter. I looked high and low through my house, checked my car a few hundred times, and called up the repair shop to see if they'd forgotten to give it back. They claimed they knew nothing of it, and that I never gave them a charger in the first place, but at this point I'd pretty much just given up trying, and just ubered to work and back for a good month. Eventually I realized that even when I do have my license, it will be good to have my scooter handy anyway, so I went and bought it a new charger at exuberant expense. One more month to my license though, so there's that.
At this stage of the whole ordeal, I had become extremely impatient with everything. I was basically under a continuous state of anxiety, hoping that the QLD government would finally re-open the license testing facilities. It did take almost three months since the initial closing, but finally, they spoke out and announced that license tests would resume. The best part is, because of my misfortune of having my test cancelled so close to the testing date, they gave me a high priority test, and allowed me to take it one day after it was re-opened. So now my anxiety is through the roof, as I haven't really done much driving practice for three straight months, and my test is in less than a week. I seriously couldn't sleep.
Despite all of that, on the 16th of June 2020, I finally, finally received my provisional driving licence, and was allowed onto the open roads without an accompanying driver.
On the 16th of July, exactly one month after receiving my license, my car was squashed.
At this point, I think its pretty safe to say that I was in no way the cause of the incident. I did everything correctly, I have a witness of the incident, and my insurance company is pretty confident that it will come back positive. However, I suspect that it will be at least one month before I get to drive my car again, as the insurance companies are still battling, and the car isn't in the best condition at the moment. But damn, what a journey. Just so many things have gone wrong for me in this regard. It's honestly quite hilarious in hindsight, it just seems so unlikely and stupid. Yes this is a very long-winded post which is essentially a glorified rant, but hey, I thought it would make a good tragic comedy.
So from now on, this thread will serve as my "members ride" post, and hopefully I'll be able to share some good luck in the future. But for now, thanks for reading.
Last edited:
I'm honestly shocked, I didn't imagine it would be a total loss, but there must have been suspension damage or engine mounting damage. I will miss it greatly. It was just such a joy to drive, and it was my first car. I'm kind of devastated to be honest.
. So now what? well, it didn't take very long (mostly because I really hate not being able to drive) but I've just bought this:
. It honestly feels amazing, like I wasn't expecting it to be this quick and agile. So far, its looking like a pretty great purchase!
