Some bad news...

Gotcha, I see - yeah, that royally sucks man. On most FWD cars - once the back end starts to rotate and the front wheels goes light on you, not a whole lot you can do in countering the slid. Almost need ESP - start countering before the rear end even hints at rotating. Even tapping the brakes to help load the front wheels doesn't help much. Pretty much just managing collateral damage at that point.

Running coilovers (looks like from the 1st pic) probably didn't help matters either. Though it is highly dependent your damping rates, spring rates, and how you balanced it F/R). They would help push the car to higher cornering speeds overall, but you also narrow that "window" where the car will go from understeer/neutral to snap oversteer. Could be as simple as running into a corner a little deeper than normal (wet road doesn't help) and accidentally unload the front end a hair (lift off the throttle or a quick steering correction) = hallelujah oversteer.

Better tires proably wouldn't have helped in that case. Grippier tires just push up that envelope of where you are going to loose traction. Sort of like AWD and ice - will just get you up to speed faster before you crash.

Work for $500 - not a bad price. Assuming they eyeballed the unitbody - sounds like they didn't notice any significant unitbody damage. Car's chassis did its job, relatively small price to pay - as both you and your wife walked away from this unhurt. That is the most important aspect. Good luck on the repair.

yea thanks bud but yea, by the time i saw the oversteer, the counter steer wasnt much help. Youre right, that window of the car snapping was pretty short for a novice driver like me. Even though i drift my mazda van which is rwd to get some practice on what to do during those occasions, the wet road and no feedback from steering didnt help. I am very suprised as to the damage. Very sturdy chassis and yes, thankfully none of us were hurt.

You know, funny thing is the scariest point was right after this incident. So now the car is parked on the side while i go on the other side where the impact was to see if any of the car parts came off. I see an older escort comin and guess what, that thing did the exact same thing I did. This is like literally 60 secs after my hit. Thank god she spun outta control a lil further and went in the ditch. She got lucky cause she was able to come out of it and drive on. Me and my wife, as scared as we already were, got in the car and got the hell out of there before someone came down that turn and hit us. So yea, im thankful to god for how everything worked out.

After takin it to a few shops, looks like im lookin at $1000 on avg to get it back to where it was. So im gonna go ahead with it and enjoy the car cause its been nothing but good to me

yea thanks, afterall, it is a corolla lol