DB7 Vantage 303346

[pdbollinger]

I owned a 2002 DB7 Vantage for almost four years, putting about 33K miles on it in Europe. I was transferring back to the US this past Spring and privately shipped the car to Houston, TX. Received an e-mail that there was some damage being unloaded, and received two pictures of the nose section showing a couple puncture marks. The stevedore company unloading the ship at the port in Houston had a female driver claim she mistook the gas pedal for the brake pedal and ran the car into a parked SUV. The resulting damage was more than a couple punctures once it was delivered to me in Austin. The right front fender was set back into the passenger door, the hood crumpled at the front, and set back into the cowl, and of course, the nose was punctured and cracked, etc.

To the credit of the insurance company representing the stevedores, they took full responsibility and asked me to get two quotes. They were willing to repair the car up to the quote from the Aston Martin Certified shop, but having done a lot of my own work, I knew what else was going to be required to be repaired, so I ultimately had the car written off and took the settlement...not as much as I would have liked, but values are still unfortunately down for DB7s. I ultimately bought a 2011 Rapide and promptly had it shipped over to Germany as I ma now back over here.

All of the above is because I found my DB7 on a site for auction ( https://www.copart.com/lot/44989099 ) but was not sold with a salvage title, even though that is what I was told would happen to the vehicle! Also wanting to try to find the new owner as I have all my records of ownership I would gladly share if he (or she...) were planning to rebuild the car. VIN is 303346...

Paul

[cadman]

i owned 2002 DB7 automatic few years back,same thing happened to me on delivery,was just minor paint work so importing company paid for repair. when first driving it i found the pedals way too close to each other.. many times while braking my foot would be still partly on the gas pedal.had a few scary moments
until i got used to it.

[pdbollinger]

The initial repair estimate was $33K. I knew there other things and the cost could easily go up to $45K because of what I also knew needed to be checked/repaired. The problem I had was knowing the torque of the engine and knowing that I had to ride the brakes to keep the car at a crawl. If the girl was not on the brakes, then the car was easily going much faster than it should have been, given what she was doing with it.