User blog:ACGuy/(Wall of text) Citroën AX

John is an 18-year-old young man, in his first year of university, got his driver-license in October with the money he earned during the summer. He would like to buy his very own car, even if it is an old one. Having a car! But he does not want to spend all his savings on a whim, because a car was not that necessary in his life. He can use the underground or the bus. But having a car, that would completely change his life!

His father, Joseph, a complete cheapskate, had not wanted to help him economically to get his license, and neither he wanted to give him nothing to buy a car. Luckily, his mother Sable, conviced his husband to, at least, let John take the family car, a 20-year-old Peugeot 405.

So John started to take the old French car regularly. At the beginning, he was very excited, but eventually, he realised that his father had neglected the maintenance. The old 405 had a lot of cheap repairs: tires, oil changes, parts replacement, and even had a small dent unrepaired in the rear, threatening the bodywork with corrosion. The gearbox did not work correctly, and the fuel consumption was quite high. Besides, the car consume a lot of oil. But he could do nothing to fix it, so he had to settle.

One day, the car refused to work and John's father was forced to take it to a workshop, so he took it to the closest one. The mechanic, a friend of his, said:

"Joseph, this car is a pile of junk. I can do a workaround, but I don't think it will pass the inspection... You've never taken care of it... It was a matter of time... You have to take good care of your car!"

He "fixed" the car, and the old Peugeot went back to the road.

John won a lot of money on the lottery: around €8000. With that money and his saving, he could buy a small new hatchback. He approached, excited, to a dealer and found that he could pay one of the models that he liked. But then, he meditated: "Waste all my money now? Just on a whim? Do I really need it?" and looked to the black numbers on his passbook. The truth is that now that he had some money, it hurt to spend it all. So he did not buy any car and kept settling with the old 405.

But a stroke of bad luck made the breaks fail and John crashed into a wall. There was no ABS, airbags, Electronic Stability Control. There was nothing but an old bad-kept car that broke down at the most inopportune time. John died instantly. That accident was highly commented in the neighbourhood. The most common comment was: "If the poor boy had gone in a new car, he would not have died."

When John's father hear of the accident, he did not feel guilty. He attributed it to the inexperience of his son, or simply bad luck. He did not associate the poor condition of the car with the tragedy. Some days later, he withdrew his son's savings from the bank: €15000! And full of reason, he said:

"My son was an idiot: with all his money he could have bought a new car instead of taking mine, that he even smashed it."