Best Of

Requested: hail damage advice.

Yesterday a storm came through Louisville and the front windshield of our Outback was hit. The top layer of the sandwiched glass has been broken in this small area seen in the photos below.

My thought is to either try to sand it out ourselves and hope for the best, or take it to a windshield repair place.

My wife suggests either going through our State Farm insurance or paying ourselves for it to replaced.

Any thoughts?

Glass breakage has zero deductible in KY. It's a comprehensive claim, and doesn't hit your insurance.

Where does the spot fall on the windshield?

Because I'm a nerd and was bored, I made a spreadsheet to calculate the cost of fuel for a given trip on the Maverick vs. the Ariya, which reflects the costs of gas (Maverick) and home and public charging on the Ariya, and has inputs for starting and ending state of charge. This has probably already been done better that I did it, but whatever...

Looks like the Ariya is generally lest costly through up to about a 250 mile roundtrip, but it's going to need a fast charge to get there, which may mean you're sitting for 30+ minutes while it charges. At interstate speeds, and for convenience purposes, I'm going to say 200 miles is the max. That's enough to visit the Cincinnati Art Museum for a bit, use their Level 2 chargers, possibly walk to grab a meal nearby, and drive home. I've also done trips to Indianapolis and Dayton, and the amount of time spent at DC fast chargers was annoying and really ate into the time I had allotted for the day trip. Of course, the Maverick can do any of those trips with no fuel stops.

The Ariya can’t manage a 200 mi. trip without charging?
For us, charging, even at the fast chargers, is always cheaper than gas. I don’t mind “sitting for 30 minutes” because we are going to stop every 150 mi. or so to get some coffee, maybe let the dog get a walk, change drivers etc. anyway. So we would do that even with an ICE car. Our days of driving straight through are well in the past.
We are planning a 400 mile trip to Northern California in the next week or so. I’m planning 2 stops mainly because a large portion of that is driving through miles of nowhere. I’d do that with an ICE vehicle too.
But taking the EV isn’t just about cost. The Blazer is simply a great road trip car.

should have eaten and run after that, but he really wanted to get the wall mount up and TV in the living room on the wall. another design that needed some design improvements. The biggest issue was needing a 7/32 drill bit that was not in the kit I brought (my son had the same one) so the pilot holes were only 3/16, so son got a good workout running the lag bolts into undersized pilot holes. And a 3rd trip to Lowes because the "fits most" disclaimer meant that their bolt collection to attach the rails to the TV did not have any long enough for his TV. longest were 35, turned out it needed 50s. Thankfully we bought some of them. And then the mounting bracket did not have enough holes (about 1/4" too narrow) so had to drill out a couple of extras, but at least they worked. After that it went pretty quickly, and when we left it was hanging on the wall nice and steady, level, and the right height. Up to them to run the wires tomorrow.

Now I hope my back spasms settle down overnight and I don't end up crippled for a week! Not doing anything strenuous tomorrow, that is for sure.