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Wisdom > Hack

You can’t keep carelessly giving other cars a door ding

Treat other vehicles like you want people to treat yours

Some people are simply not mindful of the space between cars when opening a door. PHOTO BY VERNON B. SARNE

If you love your car and care for it as though it were a family member, then you’ll make sure it is always clean, spotless and scratch-free. Which is why you don’t want other people to touch it. You hate it when strangers lean on it. And you totally lose it when small kids climb up its hood.

Alas, countless folks don’t share that love. The reality is that the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit if your car falls off a cliff. Which is why the average Joe doesn’t have a problem about putting a dent in your ride’s newly waxed sheet metal. You can see this in the way he opens his car’s door next to your prized possession, which seems invisible in his eyes judging by how he swings his door open without the slightest of caution, hitting your shiny vehicle and giving it a nasty dimple (or worse, an unsightly paint chip).

Once you spot that door ding on your precious car, it’s impossible to unsee it. PHOTO BY MANSKEE NASCIMENTO

There’s a scene in the film The Art of Self-Defense in which Jesse Eisenberg’s weakling of a character personally witnesses a pickup truck owner banging a door against his sedan. When he confronts the culprit, the latter is completely unremorseful and even bullies him for even bringing up the misdeed. Just like in real life, yes?

The prospect of one’s beloved car getting damaged at a parking lot by some insensitive douchebag is precisely why some of us devise creative ways to prevent this thing from happening. Sometimes we use random objects to serve as protective buffers; at other times we insist on parking right beside a post or a wall so that no vehicle has a chance to inflict a door ding on at least one side of our car.

Ah, the lengths we’d go to just to protect our car. PHOTOS BY VERNON B. SARNE

Door dings will no longer be an issue when all of us start respecting other people’s property. We should make it a habit to place a hand on our car door’s edge whenever we open said door so it doesn’t make contact with the vehicle parked next to us.

Let us make this a habit from now on, shall we? PHOTO BY MIGGI SOLIDUM

It’s just basic courtesy we want others to also extend to us even (and especially) when no one is looking.



Vernon B. Sarne

Vernon is the founder and editor-in-chief of VISOR. He has been an automotive journalist since July 1995. He became one by serendipity, walking into the office of a small publishing company and applying for a position he had no idea was for a local car magazine. God has watched over him throughout his humble journey. He writes the ‘Spoiler’ column.



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