Even though her 2014 Volkswagen Jetta wagon had 145-thousand miles on it, Gia Savocchi from Long Island, New York, was devastated when someone t-boned her, totaling the car. She sold the car for scrap and didn’t really think about it again until she got a DM from someone saying they had her car. "It was in Cyrillic, and I was like, ‘This is going to be a scam, 100%,’" Savocchi says. "It said something like, 'I have your car' and I was like ‘Yeah, you have my car.’"
But it was true and it wasn’t a scam. A mechanic in Ukraine had bought Savocchi’s VW and had it shipped to Ukraine. It arrived the day before the Russian invasion and it took six months before the mechanic could take possession of the vehicle and eventually fix it up. But the moment he got the Jetta back on the road, he loaded up his family and the car became their escape vehicle, helping them get to the Czech Republic and out of the war zone.
Savocchi was moved by the story of the car she reluctantly let go and how it might have saved a family half a world away. "Literally the day after it was fixed, they hopped in the car and left, and he said your car gave us new life," she says. "And it was really moving because they were stuck there." The mechanic, a father of two, tells Savocchi, "I gave her a second life and she gave me. I love this car."
Source: ABC 7 NY