death of a Rendezvous - take 2

Last year my mom rolled her 04 rendezvous just prior to thanksgiving. It performed like I would have hoped, and kept her alive/able to walk away from rolling, smacking the roof on the ditch, and hitting a utility pole upside down. The carnage pics were pretty incredible, but it ended up like this.

Mom never really liked the buick as my dad wanted it more, but my wife has an 05 and LOVES it. We bought it in anticipation of our son being born in february 2011 and ditched her cavalier. It received a new transmission, rack, tie rods, rear brakes(rotors/pads/calipers), front struts and tires within the last 6 months and just rolled 120k miles.

Yesterday on the I-71 to bagley road ramp close to the cleveland airport, she went from clean highway to black ice ramp, had cars off against the guardrail in front of her and nowhere to go. She spun, hit guardrail, and was hit head on by the car behind her. In total the ice collected 9 vehicles and the responding OSHP officer said he almost wrecked pulling onto the ramp to close it. She was ambulanced to the hospital with chest pain but luckily it was just from the seatbelt doing it's job. The buick, however, is going to be toast. Lots of frame damage and possible engine damage from oil loss as she did not shut it down right away, and the low oil/oil pressure lights came on while it was running. Will likely be buying it back as I'm not letting all those nice new parts go to the junkyard. Again, though, a Rendezvous kept one of the important people in my life safe.

Thanks, Buick.

Glad she came through that ok. I imagine she will be sore for a few days.

sounds like the buick did it's job well. I'm glad your wife is OK.

Fueled by Caffeine wrote: sounds like the buick did it's job well. I'm glad your wife is OK.

me too. i'm extremely relieved that she is ok, and at the same time i'm kinda bummed as we literally just paid it off and 2 days ago i paid off the credit card with the trans, tires, and struts. we were looking forward to a 4-5 years of no car payment. she was so excited to get the real title in the mail with the lien released.

we've got some time to discuss things, but if(when) they declare it a total loss we were possibly looking to move her into my 2005 avalanche and me into a bigger truck since i pull a trailer every day, and have a tendency to have loads right up to the 8,000 tow rating of the av. for now she'll have to drive the roadmonster when the new fuel pump shows up.

My mom has a rendezvous and loves it. Thank you for showing these pictures, now I know she will be mostly safe in any sort of accidently.

and thankfully these things are safe enough to have kept your wife very safe

Wow!

Good to hear your wife is ok. The Buick looks like it will buff out with a little effort.

Glad the Missus is OK

Glad she's OK! You can sort out the details and make a plan later - maybe pick up another one with the payout and transfer parts as needed? Small world, I heard that one of the doctors I work with occasionally was also a participant in this accident. She was sitting in the back of a cruiser when the fatal accident happened & heard all the radio chatter about it.

Glad your wife is ok.

As much as people bitch about GM products, they hold up pretty well.

XLR99 wrote: Glad she's OK! You can sort out the details and make a plan later - maybe pick up another one with the payout and transfer parts as needed? Small world, I heard that one of the doctors I work with occasionally was also a participant in this accident. She was sitting in the back of a cruiser when the fatal accident happened & heard all the radio chatter about it.

she came to check on my wife before the ambulance arrived. we were in the ER when the lady passed away that was in the Cube that got smooshed by the semi.

Ugh. Wierd thing about all of that was that the highway and ramps were fine at 615 when I went to work.

Everyone I know who has/had a Rendezvous loves them, FWIW. They seem like a very versatile car.

tow yard guy said that ramp was iced over at 7 when he went to work and almost didn't make it. trooper said odot failed

patgizz wrote: Yesterday on the I-71 to bagley road ramp close to the cleveland airport, she went from clean highway to black ice ramp, had cars off against the guardrail in front of her and nowhere to go. She spun, hit guardrail, and was hit head on by the car behind her. In total the ice collected 9 vehicles and the responding OSHP officer said he almost wrecked pulling onto the ramp to close it.

I'm rather shocked. Middleburg Heights is usually good about salting.

No so for Cleveland city proper. They don't salt and they don't plow anything except for major surface roads. The side streets by me are so rutted and lump and nasty that if it were a rallycross course we would cancel the event as being too rough. I live up by I-90 just off of Warren and take 71 to work. It took me close to an hour on Thursday morning to get from my house to I-71. Normally is ten minutes or less.

Shameless plug: Got stuck when stopping on glare ice from walking speed nudged me into a snowbank and I couldn't move. Could back up but no forward like something was binding. Thought something broke in the trans, an assumption reinfoced by flashing transmission light and check engine light immediately after. Guy behind me is trying to move around me, traffic next to him is stopped so he can go, but he's stuck. berkeley, i think, I am going nowhere, so I jump out and push him out so traffic can at least get moving. Then the guy parks half a block ahead of me, runs out, and helps push me out too. Cleveland people are awesome. Nobody honking horns, nobody cutting anyone off, nobody ignoring turn signals when someone needs to move over...

I think the ramps are ODOT. I get off at Pearl to get to the hospital by Fowles, and that ramp was fine; sounds like they just 'forgot' to hit the Bagley ramp . Knurled, pretty cool to see someone actually help someone else, isn't it? The CLE 'snow removal' reminds me of when I worked at UH a long time ago. Driving on Chester at midnight, and a CPD crusier came up next to me & yelled at me over the loudspeaker to slow down. He then gassed it to pass me, lost it and put the car into the snowbank along the side. I was nice and stopped to help drag it out onto the road again, then pointed out that I was on Blizzaks vs their all season fleet tires.

Good news is that all the new parts should slap right on an Aztec, and since everyone hates them they should be easy to find.

More seriously, though, in that vintage almost every non-truck GM suv/van/crossover thing shared pretty much the same underpinnings, so using your parts on something similar should be easy enough.

knurled - i'm up there ALL THE TIME. my cousin lives on robinwood along the lakewood high football field and my buddy rents a shop on 112th at madison next to the train tracks. he lives over in ohio city and they just got plowed out yesterday. i own a house up on e169 too that my other cousin rents from me, and i'm betting her shoveling the driveway made it cleaner than the streets.

the odd thing is she never takes bagley, she gets off at pearl and catches bagley there since her office is on 130th just north of bagley. she was blocked in and couldn't get to the exit for pearl so she kept going, and as luck would have it the one day she takes that ramp is the one day it is a sheet of ice. unfortunately only a couple guys here can read that paragraph without scratching their heads or looking at a map, but you guys know how it works.

as for cleveland people, i'm one (born at fairview hospital, spent most of my formative years on highland between w117 and bellaire). it always seems like the crap is bad, we band together instead of being all for ourselves. i pulled a guy out of the ditch sunday, he got pulled out in front of and hit snow drift and had his rear end up sunk in the snow and mud. avalanched his ram out.

oldopelguy wrote: Good news is that all the new parts should slap right on an Aztec, and since everyone hates them they should be easy to find. More seriously, though, in that vintage almost every non-truck GM suv/van/crossover thing shared pretty much the same underpinnings, so using your parts on something similar should be easy enough.

Aztecs are becoming valuable, thanks to idiots that only like things everyone hates and some tv show about a guy that started a meth lab..

I did not realize that XLR and Knurled are both Cleveland guys.
I personally was born in Toledo but have lived the past nearly 5 years here on the Roller Coast.

I personally was up near Great Northern Mall the morning of this accident. I typically would drive Rt2/I-90 but that morning made the decision to spend the money and take The Turnpike the whole way. As expected, when I crossed over Rt2 I could see that the road was "two-tracks" in the slow lane and still fully white in the fast lane. On The Turnpike, all 3 lanes were merely wet. They charge outrageous rates for The Turnpike but they spare no expense in clearing the darn road.

JohnRW1621 wrote: I typically would drive Rt2/I-90 but that morning made the decision to spend the money and take The Turnpike the whole way. As expected, when I crossed over Rt2 I could see that the road was "two-tracks" in the slow lane and still fully white in the fast lane. On The Turnpike, all 3 lanes were merely wet. They charge outrageous rates for The Turnpike but they spare no expense in clearing the darn road.

I would have stayed in the all white fast lane.. no tracks to get stuck in

In reply to patgizz:

Ha! I grew up on Bellaire a block away from the junkyard. They used to let us kids in to wander around.

Knurled, if you're mid/late 40s you probably know several the guys I work with. They have all kinds of stories about the junkyard, railroad tracks/ hobos, and some kind of drainage ditch or tunnel back before I480 was built.

Knurled wrote: In reply to patgizz: Ha! I grew up on Bellaire a block away from the junkyard. They used to let us kids in to wander around.

i went to st ignatius grade school. my grandma lived on joan a couple houses down from 105th, my uncle still lives in the house.

the drainage ditch by the junkyard that runs between highland and cress/crescent was a big reason we moved to medina. the neighborhood bad kids got me to come back to the ditch claiming someone's brother had fallen down it and needed help. he was down there, but had a gun pointed at me and took a shot. i don't remember much(shot missed) other than the neighbor followed and got me out of there. i used to get made fun of for going to catholic school, never did find out what the reason they tried to off me was though.

my mom's dad used to work at the broken wheel when he was laid off from the steel mill. my dad worked the mill for 24 years until LTV closed. they took my grandparents' house on w 74 to build i-90.

Glad your wife is OK. Don't you also have another Rendezvous with Torq-Thrusts? Or am I losing my mind?

I'm afraid to ask, but what's the status on my old wagon?

same rendezvous, different rims. put the stockers back on with some nice goodyears for winter.

wagon is still DD'd by my buddy, 40 miles a day round trip from ohio city to warrensville and back. when it got stolen they tore the column and stole the cat and left the car in the middle of the street doors open. he got it back, bandaged column, straight pipe where cat was, and keeps driving it.