I bought it new in 1970 as my college commute car and 10 days later a drunk ran me off the road and I flipped it trying to get it back onto the road is a downhill sideways drift. It tripped getting back onto the pavement and went airborne at 50mph, landed upside down on the driver nose , rocked up onto the driver A pillar and then onto the roof and spun down the road on its top and then finally flipping over onto the passenger side. All at night, watching the road rush toward me and my passenger, and then listening to the crunching and crashing noise was quite the adventure. Neither my passenger no I were injured in anyway, other than financially, and we walked out of the wreck thru where the windshield had been.
The drunk did not stop and there were no other cars on the road since we were 50 miles from town in the middle of the Elk Hills Oil Preserve. I know the other guy was drunk because the rancher we were going to meet at his western gate saw a drunk weaving down the road at high speed headed in our direction about 6 miles further down the road on which we were traveling.
Finally a Forest Service worker drove onto the scene and helped us push it onto all 4 wheels, we changed a flat tire and drove away!! It was a total but still moving,,,one tough little car. As we drove up to my friend who was still waiting for us the look on his face was priceless when he saw it. “Where is your new car and what happened to this?” Was the question. “I came around a corner back there and a big dixiecup was in the road” was came to mind first. We got lucky.
I spent the next three days stretching the little beast to make it more drivable so we could make it the 400 miles back home. It was winter so we used duct tape and taped in convertible rear window plastic and moved the driving lamps I had on the bumper to the now wrecked roof and drove through a rain storm to get home with the wipers flapping back and forth on the plastic, fully expecting to be wearing that plastic but it held.
It was an amazing trip and one my passenger still remembers vividly today.
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