Having a valet take and park your vehicle is always a harrowing experience, but that’s because there are small instances where a valet driver takes a car for a joyride and it ends in disaster. That’s what one man is going through as Atlanta’s NBC affiliate 11 Alive reports how a valet driver allegedly took his CT5-V Blackwing on a joy ride that ended in a pretty decent wreck.
Joe Luck — an ironic name given the situation — finally got his dream car after a year-and-a-half of waiting: a Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing. But the dream ended fairly quickly the week of July 16, when Luck dropped his car off at the valet before heading to dinner in downtown Atlanta. Things took a turn for the worse from there.
Luck later told 11 Alive that he went outside to find that his car after dinner, which had originally been parked in front of the restaurant, was no longer parked there. The valet service told him that his vehicle had been sideswiped, so it needed to be moved.
What Luck saw when he got his car was done by much more than a sideswipe. “The side airbags deployed on both sides, and then the driver’s side seat airbag deployed also,” Luck said. “The rear quarter panels destroyed the rear driver’s axles off the car.
So, Luck, hoping to find out what really happened, took to looking at the Blackwing’s integrated Performance Data Recorder capture, which told a very different story.
You watch the vehicle leave its parking spot in front of the restaurant and cruise for a few blocks. The valet puts in a couple of spirited pumps of the throttle before slowing down to attempt a u-turn. That’s when the Blackwing gets t-boned. If you listen in, you can hear the guy behind the wheel grunt a few times before saying, “Oh my god.” He places a call. You can’t hear who’s on the other end at first, but after they bleep out his name he says, “This is not a good one.” Another voice replies, “What’s up?” The valet replies, “I got **** t-boned.”
Luck, had only had the Blackwing for six months and it had just 4,000 miles at the time of the accident. Now he’s stuck figuring out next steps. The valet company, National Parking, said it terminated the driver, and issued a statement regarding the incident:
National Parking has been proudly serving the southeast for 40 years, delivering the highest quality valet service in the industry to hundreds of thousands of customers every year. Unfortunately, accidents and damages are a reality of the valet parking industry. We recognize that, although only a small percentage of our interactions result in claims, every incident is an inconvenience on our customers. As such, we pride ourselves on our reputation as industry leaders in managing each and every claim that comes through and ensuring that they are resolved in an expeditious, fair, and efficient manner.
Luck, however told 11 Alive he’s been left in the dark by National Parking, and hasn’t received any of the company’s insurance information, which the company literally says in the statement would be “resolved in an expeditious, fair and efficient manner.”
While Luck awaits any sort of help or recourse on his destroyed Blackwing, he has made it very clear he will never use a valet service again. “…I’ll never valet a vehicle ever again. I’ll figure out something, even if I have to pay extra to park my own vehicle. I won’t trust them with the keys to my car ever again.”