Grace Riecken was driving to work on a Monday morning in Omaha, Nebraska when things went very wrong. Her mid-2000s Hyundai Santa Fe started acting strange after she hit a curb. The car had been with her since high school, so she knew right away something was off.
As per the TikTok video, the car kept shaking as she drove through rush hour traffic. Then her tire completely fell off while she was on the highway. Luckily, she was able to keep control and pull over to the side of the road without hitting anyone. When she got out to look, she saw her front passenger tire and rim had broken clean off. The wheel parts were just sitting on the ground. She called her boss to say she would be late. Then she called her fiancé and her dad.
Her dad told her to go look for the tire before he came to help. So Riecken started walking through the tall grass next to the highway trying to find it. A man walked up and asked if she was looking for a wheel. She said yes. He told her he worked at a Lexus dealership nearby and he knew where her tire was. “We accept trades,” the dealership is known for saying, but this was not the kind of trade-in they expected. Her tire had gone through the front window of his dealership.
Her tire crashed into the last place you’d want it to go
Riecken was worried someone got hurt. But the man said everyone was okay. The staff were all in a meeting upstairs when they heard a loud crash. They came down and found her tire on the showroom floor with a broken window. Her dad told her not to say the tire was hers when he heard what happened. But she talked with the dealership worker anyway and he was nice about the whole thing. They waited together until her dad showed up.
Even though it sounds like a crazy story, things worked out fine for Riecken in the end. The window cost $13,000 to fix. But her car insurance paid for all of it. She did not have to spend any of her own money. Her parents were paying for her insurance at the time, so she was not sure if the price went up.
She got married about a month later and started paying for it herself. She did get three or four points added to her driving record. But that was not a big deal since she never had any tickets or accidents before. When she made a video about it later, those points were already gone and her insurance rates had decreased.
This story shows why you should get your car checked after hitting something. Small problems can turn into big ones fast. Other drivers have found out their cars had serious damage when they thought everything was fine.
