Why i'm thankful for my front license plate
 

edit: apologies for huge pics, but they should resize when they load fully.

so driving home last night after work, on the highway in the left lane as usual. i see a car coming up from behind me that's kinda weaving through traffic. he gets up next to me and i'm sure he's looking to get in front of me. so i let him-i slow down, give him plenty of room. sure enough he aggressively switches into my lane without and indicator. what happened next however i didn't expect. the guy must have not been looking ahead of him or something, but he slams the brakes as he hits the Mercedes who was ahead of me. trying to go from about 40 to 0, with cars on either side of me i knew i was gonna hit him. sure enough i did and it sounded absolutely horrible. what's worse is as we were all switching lanes to pull over (he had his blinkers on like myself and the Mercedes), i lost site of him because of a truck. i pull over behind the Mercedes and the fucking guy is gone. i got a make/model and maybe 2 numbers from his license plate.

i looked at my damage though and it wasn't nearly as bad as i expected. i had some scuffs along some of my front edges, but it was nothing that couldn't be cleaned up relatively easily. the guy in the Mercedes seemed like a big shot and couldn't care less about the matter. he brushed it off (his damage was a lot worse than mine) as cosmetic and started getting ready to leave. we filed a report and swapped numbers just in case, so nothing more comes out of this.

as you'll see from the pics, the plate took the brunt of the damage. it looks like i had a dent behind the left license plate screw, but i already fixed that so it's really just the scuffs. coulda been worse.

here are the pics:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/71070185/mis...2008.46.52.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/71070185/mis...2008.47.00.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/71070185/mis...2008.47.10.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/71070185/mis...2008.47.22.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/71070185/mis...2008.47.45.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/71070185/mis...2008.48.12.jpg

I was parked behind my friend's car on his driveway once. He had to go out for a bit, and backed right up into my car because he SOMEHOW didn't see a friggen car right behind his own. I checked to see the damage, and my car was prefectly fine. His rear bumper had a huge dent that was the perfect shape of the screws on my front license plate. I promised myself to never get a front plate relocation kit after that.

I'm still thankful I don't have a front license plate at all and it looks awesome. :)

Sorry to hear about the accident. Hopefully it all gets cleaned up good as new.

Wow, that's unfortunate. Glad to hear you're OK.

Get a dashcam. Well worth the small price of admission.

yea, been considering it. how does it work, are they hardwired to your battery?

I just got the Blackvue DR400G-HD the other day from the groupbuy on Massdrop.

You can hardwire it to the battery. They have the Power Magic Pro power kit that allows you to set the time, as well as preventing your battery from draining too much.

http://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16300

Check this DIY out and yah it connects to your car battery with your Circuit fuse that is perm on, but you have a manual switch with the cam so it's not always on.

Glad everyone is ok.

Consider BumpShox.