Please bow your head for a moment of silence for the MINI family.

Traffic is moving again following a diesel truck fire Saturday night that had fire crews mopping up the scene for hours and backing up northbound traffic on i-5.
At around 8:30pm the diesel truck was transporting new BMW's and Mini Coopers when it caught on fire between mile markers 9 and 10.
Crews from Ashland Fire, Jackson County Fire District 5 and Oregon Department of Forestry were on scene working to put the blaze out.
"The cause is still under investigation but usually incidents like this are due to brake problems," said Todd Stubbs, from Ashland Fire.
Nobody was injured, and the truck drivers insurance company is also looking into what caused the fire.





http://www.kobi5.com/news/local-news...?category_id=3

 

Difficult to place that, the references are local. It seems to be in Southern Oregon. Poor MINIs

I thought Oregon and Washington MINIs landed in Washington State, not Port Heueme.

 

RIP BMW's and MINI's. Rock the curves in motoring heaven.

 

It sucks for the people who were awaiting their arrival of their MINIs and BMWs.

 

Wouldn't it be unfortunate if one of the MINIs belonged to one of those "first time MINI owner just waiting for it to be delivered" guys on first gear? Poor MINIs..hope they ride the ultimate twisty runs in heaven

 

What would happen in a case like that? Like say I had a custom built MINI on that truck that just got toasted....would the truck's insurance company pay to have another one built? How does that work?

 

Would assume the truck's insurance would cover the car just like any other and it would be up to the dealer to order a replacement (assuming you can still order whatever it was). If they couldn't order the same thing anymore and the potential owner really wanted to I suppose they could sue the trucking company, but that seems a bit silly and I imagine they'd have trouble quantifying damages.

A cargo truck is nothing compared to this...

 

Gaack!

 

I knew this was going to surface. Only a matter of time. Coming from Mazda I saw this every day for about a month after it happened.

 

That Mazda link was actually quite fascinating. And good for them, they did the right thing by assuring that those compromised cars would never hit the road, risking someone's life.

 

Unfortunately for the new owners it's likely they just put a down-payment and technically do not officially own the car. So it's mostly a business between the truck company and BMW. Unfortunately for the owners they may have to wait again and if their dealer feel generous they might give them something on reorder if they don't want to loose the sale. Sad indeed...

 

Yea that was kind of my point because with only having the deposit down, does that deposit transfer to a new car, or do they get it back as a refund? It's definitely not a situation I'd like to find myself in.

 

Just thought it made sense - kinda puts things into perspective vs. a ruined truckload of cars.

Don't really see that it's anything to hide... Mazda did the right thing for themselves and their consumers. Kudos to them!

With regards to the MINIs and people who may have had deposits down: I'd expect any reasonable dealer would either refund the deposit or apply it to another car as the buyer chose. It's only a handful of cars and the bad publicity from refusing to refund a deposit under the circumstances would surely outweigh any benefits from not doing so... Whole point in the deposit is to guarantee sale of the car they're custom ordering and keep the dealer from potentially getting stuck with it. In this case there's no car to get stuck with.