Inconvenient Car Troubles

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Papa Nito Enemy Stand
Simple question for those of you who drive.

What's the worst location, or worst time your car has ever broken down on you? And not something that can simply be fixed on location like a flat tire, or jump starting a battery. I'm talking something that'd require a tow truck.
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Right after work, in the restaurant's parking lot... It would not start because of a dead battery or something. Didn't need a tow truck though... Just Cherry to bring her car over and pick up the jumper cables from her house.
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Cat-ness NekoMancer
Going to a convention middle of a large city and the timing belt breaks, walk the mile to the convention center call state-farm,
next morning I went and picked up my car from the garage. Didn't have to pay anything they covered the tow and the repair.
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Taz_9000 Cafe Regular
no car trouble, but get hit on the side from a car coming out of a side street, car needed to be towed and was then written off.
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Hanayome Ultimate Laziness
My serpentine belt broke on the highway while going ~70mph. Luckily on was on the lane next to the shoulder so I was able to quickly get on there while my car slowed down to 0 in a few seconds.
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Papa Nito Enemy Stand
Hanayome wrote...
My serpentine belt broke on the highway while going ~70mph. Luckily on was on the lane next to the shoulder so I was able to quickly get on there while my car slowed down to 0 in a few seconds.


Damn! Things could've went South way fast in that kind of scenario. Should've been scary as Hell.
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Well I have an older bmw 3 series. I lost my belt tensioner pulley at 9pm while going through a
Mountain pass. My alternator wasn't spinning, nor was the water pump. Car started overheat which is what caused me to pull over. Somehow managed to drive out of the pass and into a parking lot, of course I had lost power steering by this point. I was 90 miles from home on a Sunday night.

Managed to get a hold of my dad (who is a truck driver and only home on weekends) and he went to pick me up in his pickup. Got home at midnight. On our way to his house we saw an acquaintance of his outside at that time of the night who happened to own a tow dolly. Managed to borrow it to go back to pick up my car. Made it back home with car at 5am.

Amazing what a hassle a missing tensioner pulley can cause.
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bongzilla Your Weird Cousin
I've had nearly every car I owned (or borrowed for extended periods of time) break down on me at some point, but the scariest was when I was borrowing my dad's old pickup truck because my own car was in the shop for repairs. After getting the keys from my dad, I noticed right away that the brakes felt odd, then not 10 minutes later they gave out completely as I was trying to come to a stop at a red light! I thought quickly of using the emergency brake, but it only slowed me down halfway through the intersection. Luckily, the light had just changed and the cross traffic hadn't even started moving yet, so I managed to get through the intersection without getting creamed. When I managed to pull off the road a half block later into a parking lot, even my emergency brakes were gone and only a raised sidewalk kept me from crashing into the side of a building. Turns out that an entire section of the brake-line had somehow corroded and burst, and I of course had brake-fluid leaking all over the place.

Scariest part was that my dad had just driven that same truck to me from out of state the day before. If the brakes had given out while he was on the freeway, this would have been a much more tragic story...
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My car broke down in a turn lane during the winter, just about an hour before traffic time and traffic had already begun to build up. It died because of a leaky battery, a jumpstart would not get it running since it was at the point where it was completely dead. I had to call up my friend Space to help me push it out of the road. The closest place to get it off the road was an uphill turnout.