F&J - Carpool edition

I enjoyed/enjoy the recent fair and just thread and made me think that maybe there are other situations where the "right" answer might not be same for different people. 
 

so I present this scenario that happened a few years back.  
 

I don't think all of these details are relevant but am including them in case others want to consider them. 
 

my wife and her friend were going away for a weekend to a place about 3 hours away.  Her friend offered to drive so my wife headed to her place about 45 minutes away. 
 

when she got there her friend said that she no longer wanted to drive because she didn't want the miles on her car so my wife said they could take our car.  
 

either on the way there or back, her friend was driving and hit a large piece of tire from a semi blow out.  It was kicked up by the car in front of them. 
 

It broke the foglight, foglight housing and dented the hood pretty bad. 
 

i fixed the damage and didn't give it a second thought.  For some reason this incident came up in a conversation with an unassociated friend who expressed that he thought my wife's friend should have offered to pay for half. 
 

Curious to hear what others' opinions are. 
(I'm fine having paid for it and the friend is a good person with whom we've never had any issues so the opinions here won't affect me or the relationship with her friend!)

If I was driving , especially if I balked at the initial offer to drive my own car, I would have offered to pay. I would have felt personally responsible. I would have left it up to the person who's car I just destroyed how much I'm responsible for. 

But other people ⁰see the world differently.

If I were the driver I would have offered to pay for it all but not expecting my offer to be taken. Either way I would have been fine with 100% to nothing.

If I were the car owner I would have done as you did and just fixed it. If the driver offered I would have politely declined. If they insisted I would have said something like "How about you pay for dinner next time?"

To a non-car person (which I assume the friend is) the damage would be seen as an insurance claim. Therefore, they would have thought, "your car-your insurance." 

For you, a car person, you did the work yourself.  I'll assume the friend was non capable of doing it "herself.". She may have known you were capable so she just let you do those things you do.