PS: A similar incident happened to me in the previous spring, when I was kicked off a Delta flight (after presenting at the SAMLA conference) without cause (just like the Asian American doctor that had patients to see next day in recent news reports) and had to drive through the night in a rented car from Atlanta to Pennsylvania, a 14-hour trip, to teach classes that morning; at least Delta paid for the rental ($350 or so) without a lawsuit.
I immediately filed a claim with Nationwide for them to cover the total loss of the cover as part of the original claim for the parking lot collision, as it seemed something could have been internally damaged during the collision that eventually led to the failure. Nationwide declined the claim on the basis that the failure was mechanical and due to the age of the car. Both Jiffy Lube and Chandler denied responsibility for causing the damages and also blamed my elderly vehicle.
I kept detailed records and took photographs of everything related to this incident. A photo from the scene of the first breakdown shows a long strip of radiator coolant spilled in a perpendicular pattern across the road where I pulled the car over.
There is also a photo of the mechanic that put in a new radiator showing a hand-length gap in my old radiator. I don’t have a similar photo of the new radiator they put in, but if the fault was an accidental cracking of the radiator, why would a brand-new radiator have cracked in an identical pattern, leading to the same smoke, rattling and engine failure. Only if the engine had already been damaged could it have cracked both radiators in the same way. Thus, either Jiffy Lube or Chandler must have damaged the engine during their repairs because the car was fine before they started, and kept exploding the radiators after they completed the work.
After the insurance claim and BBB complaints failed to convince all parties that they were in the wrong, I filed the first civil lawsuit against Jiffy Lube, as the damage occurred after they worked on it twice. Initially, they said that they had a video of the work they did on the car. I saw the mechanics slacking and fooling around during this “work,” so I definitely was happy to see that video. When I welcomed it, they said that it so happened that the camera was broken only for that episode with my incident, emailing a jpeg of their camera’s files log to prove this claim. This file had a very strange problem as it was truncated, mailing only the top 3 lines visible.
Jiffy Lube’s “Camera Stop” log
Radiator fluid on the road after first post-Jiffy break-down
Jiffy Lube mechanic pointing out the size of the crack in my radiator during its replacement
Jiffy Lube mechanic working on my car