   I’m a local CDL driver and often work 6 days a week. My commute is 60 to 65 miles a day depending on which route I take to work. Snowstorm? I’m expected at work. Hurricane? We might still need you to come in. In the year and a half I’ve owned my car, I’ve put around 25,000 miles on it. It’s a 2025 Toyota Corolla LE, and while it may not be much, it is mine. I bought it brand new. 

My commute to work is in the early hours of the morning. Typically around 1 to 3am. Last winter during a bad ice storm I was on my way in.  A chunk of ice fell off a semi infront of me, and I didn’t react fast enough to escape it. I tried to swerve out of the way and almost succeeded, but it clipped my bumper on the drivers side. All the pieces were still there, it just cracked in several places. 

I did get a quote from a nearby body shop to fix it, and it would be right around $1,000 for a replacement. so I did the next logical thing for a guy who’s racking up the miles on a economy car…I went to Facebook. I found a gentleman who came out to my house and plastic welded the bumper for a few hundred bucks. Got some paint match from the local NAPA and we were rolling !! Everything looked great. 

Flash forward to today….It’s my day off. I’m driving through some windy mountain roads. The car infront of me suddenly swerves into the other lane. Before even seeing what they’re swerving for; I’m checking for escape routes. There’s a line of cars on one side of me and a barricade on the other. I’m trapped. There’s a plastic bucket in the road. I manage to slow down to about 15 miles per hour, and ride the white line as close as I can. Contact is made. I pull over to examine the damage, already knowing in the back of my mind it cracked the plastic weld. 

This sucks. It cracked in exactly the same spots, and Ofcourse it did. Those are the weak points. And I know I can’t just reweld it again. My only option is the pay a body shop to replace it, or buy a cheap $200 folded bumper online and try to paint it and install it myself. I don’t want to leave my car like this. But it’s also my commuter car. I already have a project car I’m sinking money into, and I don’t want to pour money into this one too. 

I haven’t filed a claim for these because when I was a teenager I had a pretty messy driving history as far as tickets go. A few years back those finally fell off my record and filing a claim for something like this simply isn’t worth it to me. I’d rather pay a one time fee out of pocket than pay an additional $15 or $20 a month for five years. 

My bumper has broken twice in the same spot