Driver decapitated as car 'stuck in cruise control' slams into truck at 190kph
A terrified driver had pleaded with an emergency operator for help, saying his car was stuck in cruise control at close to 200kph, moments before he was decapitated in a high speed crash.
A coroner’s inquest into the death of Kaushal Gandhi was played an eight-minute recording, in which Mr Gandhi told a police operator his car was driving itself on the M40 motorway on February 2.
The recording played to the Buckinghamshire Coroner's Court ended when the 32-year-olds’s Skoda Octavia skewed off the road and slammed into the rear of a truck.
In an odd twist, however, investigators said they could find no evidence of the late motorist's reported defects.
“I have just passed the exit of the M40 towards Slough. It is not letting me stop,” Mr Gandhi told a Thames Valley Police emergency operator.
“It shows 70mph but I think I am going much faster than this," Mr Gandhi said on the 999 recording.“
The conversation reveals the drivers confusion, as he speculates that his car’s sports setting may be responsible.
Efforts to slow the vehicle with its gears or disengage the transmission altogether also failed.
"I am trying. It is not stopping at neutral," he said.
"I have kept pressing the button but all it makes is a noise.”
The recording ends shortly after the operator tells Mr Gandhi to try pulling his handbrake. He replies that he does not know what will happen if he does so, because his car is currently speeding down the middle lane of a motorway.
Emergency services found Mr Gandhi’s decapitated remains and the Skoda with its roof peeled off shortly afterwards.
The Mirror reports Senior Coroner Cripsin Butler told the court data analysis could not find any evidence of the defects Mr Gandhi had reported.
The data showed the vehicle was travelling at about 186kph when it crashed. It suggested the accelerator was pressed hard to the floor.
No signs of braking were evident at the scene but the coroner ruled there was also no indication Mr Gandhi had deliberately killed himself.
A police officer, however, told the coroner video evidence from the M40 motorway appeared to back up Mr Gandhi’s fears, but an unlikely combination of faults would have needed to preceded the tragedy.
Police collision investigator Andrew Evans said the car should have been able to be pulled into neutral without disengaging the clutch, even at high speed.
"We would have to have had an electronic failure earlier and also a mechanical failure of the clutch as well,” he said, according to The Mirror.
"If you are in sixth gear and you need to knock it into neutral at those speeds, you should be able to do that without using the clutch."
