Sent to the junk yard?! No way!

It all happened so suddenly. One second, I was cruising along the Shuto Expressway, and the next... I'm struggling to even keep my engine running. You'd say machines have no instinct. After all, you'd think they have no soul, right? Well, you'd be wrong! Because, instinctively, I knew that, in that moment, with my frame impossibly bent and my headlights shattered, if my engine stopped...

It would never start again.

Now that I think about it, my battery's the important part. I just drained my fuel for nothing! Well it didn't matter, because a 36-ton monster had just crashed into me. My airbags were deployed, but nothing was moving inside my cab. My driver was dead. For once it was my occupant who had his life taken away. Even though it wasn't his fault, it felt like years of karma ultimately amounted to my sudden destruction. 

But the karma wasn't mine! It was the drivers' fault! Why did retribution have to come at the price of my own life?! My engine started sputtering. I felt my black blood draining from my engine block and onto the floor below. It swirled and mixed with the puddle of fuel which was forming from my crushed up gas tank... pooling around my wheels.

It didn't have to end like this. I wanted to retire once my mileage was deemed too much by my company, so I could rest in a car park forever and ever, to grow moss and maybe even host a bird nest or two. My goal was definitely not to be sent to one of these places where corpses of non-functional vehicles were crushed up into little metal cubes.

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I sensed people approaching me. They were trying to get my driver out of here, pulling, pushing and trying to pry me open with bits of my own body. But my doors were so horribly twisted that they were like fused to my cabin. There was nothing I could do. I inhabited this mechanical body, but I wasn't capable of commanding any of the functions that were built into me. At that point, I was even questioning my purpose. My origin...

BZZT

Oh no. My battery was damaged after all! I knew what was going to happen. A chain reaction of which I would be the origin. All these poor people were going to die. I had to help them, but I was powerless. They needed a sign. Anything. My horn! I needed to access it, but how...

I was, all of a sudden, graced with it. As if the connection had always been there, although artificially suppressed. In what would be my final effort, I blared my horn. The people around mistook me for the driver, but it didn't matter, as they understood my intent. They rushed away from me. Just in time.

At least I wouldn't be sent to the junk yard.

--

Earlier this morning at around 10:30, a light duty delivery truck and an 18-wheeler semi-truck collided on the Central Circular Route of the Shuto Expressway. The crash resulted in the catastrophic explosion of the Mitsubishi Fuso and the death of its driver, 31 year-old Yuki Toru, who heroically forfeited his chances of survival by warning nearby people of the imminent explosion of his vehicle, and therefore, of the subsequent explosion of the semi-truck.

Thanks to his sacrifice, he remains as the only casualty of an accident that could've claimed many more lives. An investigation is currently in progress to determine the causes of such an event.