Total bummer, sorry to hear about that. Hopefully things start to look up for you.
You make an excellent point, one that I pondered after considering the good fortune of it not hurting anyone in my back seat as I had a family member back there. Steel panel did it's job fortunately.You really are lucky that piece of shrapnel didn’t do worse damage or hurt you or anybody else!! I know it doesn’t “feel” lucky to you, but many years ago I had a coworker who had a piece of steel similar to yours come through the floorboard of his Chrysler LHS and clip his calf! It was a somewhat minor injury that caused him surprising and significant long term problems. Very glad you are not injured!! Steel and paint can be fixed! If it’s any minor consolation to you, my car does not have a single panel that doesn’t have a ding or dent. I even have dings on the roof from flying debris. My car seems like a 460hp catchers mitt.
It looks like a piece of car jack. I am just wondering what that metal was doing there.In another twist of fate today, I earned this lovely ear mark on my car. View attachment 31039
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I am pretty bummed about this to be frank. The cause was an errant piece of bent steel lying in the middle of the roadway and impossible to see in the dark conditions I was driving in. All was well until I heard a very deep "thunk" as I was driving along. Initially I thought a rock might have hit my car somehow or something, but when I pulled over to check the damage I determined the true cause.
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The hit must have been extremely hard. The scratch is bored down to shiny metal and the door panel is bent around the impact. Glad it didn't go through a window in hindsight.
Either way, yet another blemish has appeared on my car, the latest in a string of poor luck events this year for my car (from an attempted break in on the beginning of January, to my tires exploding and being damaged in the last two months, to this new tragedy).
Anyways, I am planning to discuss this with my insurance tomorrow. Fortunately I have full coverage and will only need to pay $500 to get everything fixed, but that's $500 out of my pocket now, not to mention whatever else they'll need to do to fix a scratch of this magnitude.