AIW for demanding my friend pay for a brand new wheel rim after he hit a massive pothole in my car?
I am currently getting frozen out by my core friend group because of a financial dispute and I honestly need to know if my logic is warped here. About two weeks ago, a close buddy of mine asked to borrow my car for a couple of hours. His own ride was in the shop for some scheduled brake maintenance and he needed to run down to a specialized industrial hardware store across town to pick up some heavy materials for a weekend project. I have a 2007 Passat B6, it is nothing fancy but I keep it mechanically solid and the suspension is dialed in perfectly. I did not see any harm in it, so I handed him the keys and told him to just keep an eye on the road because our local routes have some brutal frost heaves right now .
He comes back about three hours later, drops the keys on my kitchen counter, and casually mentions that he hit a rough patch of asphalt but everything seemed fine. He leaves, and I do not think much of it until the next morning when I go out to drive to work. As soon as I get up to about forty, the entire steering wheel starts vibrating like crazy and the front right side is making a distinct thumping noise. I immediately pulled over into a gas station to inspect the damage. The front passenger side aluminum rim has a massive, deep flat spot right on the outer lip and the tire is completely ruined from a sidewall pinch. It was completely holding air by a miracle but the wheel itself is structurally dead.
I took it to the local tire shop I always use to see if it could be straightened out on a hydraulic press. The tech took one look at it, put it on the balancer, and told me it is cracked near the spoke and completely unsafe to repair. I called my friend right away, explained the situation, and told him he needs to cover the cost of a replacement wheel and a new tire since they have to match across the axle. He immediately got defensive and said the rim was already nearly twenty years old and probably had hairline fatigue cracks anyway. He offered to give me fifty bucks to find a mismatched rusty steel wheel from a junkyard.
I told him absolutely not. I do not drive around on sketchy junk, and I demanded he pay for an original OEM alloy wheel to match the rest of my set, plus the fresh rubber. The total came out to a little over three hundred bucks. Now he is telling everyone that I am using a minor road accident to hustle him into funding a hardware upgrade for an old car. Two of our mutual friends already messaged me saying I am being an asshole for breaking a friendship over a used aluminum part on a cheap daily driver. I do not think it matters how old the car is, he wrecked a perfectly functional part of my property due to bad situational awareness. Am I wrong here for holding my ground on this?