An inquest has heard an eight-and-a-half minute 999 call made by a driver who claimed his cruise control was stuck, leaving him unable to stop his car reaching speeds of more than 100 miles an hour before it slammed into a stationary lorry on the M40.
Kaushal Gandhi, 32, was decapitated when his Skoda Octavia collided with the 18-tonne truck, which was parked in a layby close to where the motorway merges with the A40 in Denham, Buckinghamshire.
The force of the impact, in the early hours of 2 February, embedded the car under the lorry up to its back wheels and peeled its roof back. The inquest in Beaconsfield on Thursday heard that the 999 operator was on the line with the driver when his car hit the lorry.
Gandhi, who worked for Rehncy Shaheen chartered accountants in Greenford, west London, told the male operator: “My car is not coming out of the cruise control. I have just passed the exit of the M40 towards Slough. It is not letting me stop. It [the speedometer] shows 70mph, but I think I am going much faster than this.”
The operator, from Thames Valley police, asked him if he could slow the vehicle by braking or using the gears. Gandhi responded: “I am trying. It is not stopping at neutral.” A faint beep could be heard as he tried turning off the engine by pressing the start-stop button on the car, which does not have an ignition requiring a key.
The inquest heard that the car’s data-recorder was destroyed in the collision but had fed information to the airbag system. However, senior coroner Crispin Butler said this failed to provide evidence of the defects that Gandhi, from Harrow, north London, described on his 999 call.
Martin Clatworthy, a vehicle data examiner and safety specialist for Volkswagen, which makes the Skoda, told the inquest that the airbag systems gave the speed, steering, accelerator pedal position and braking of the car in the five seconds before the crash.
The car was travelling at 116mph with the accelerator pedal fully depressed five seconds before the crash, while no braking was recorded. It continued to accelerate and hit a top speed of 119mph, with the accelerator pedal pressed two-thirds of the way down. Then just two seconds before the impact, at 94mph (152kph), the accelerator was not depressed at all.
“There is no indication that there was any error or problem with any of the electronic systems of the car in the five seconds leading up to the collision,” Clatworthy said.
Police collision investigator Andrew Evans said there were no skid marks near the layby and that the faults Gandhi described meant the Skoda would have had to have suffered a simultaneous mechanical and electronic failure.
Applying the handbrake could have saved the driver’s life by forcing the car’s rear wheels to lock up and turn it around so it skidded backwards.
The coroner ruled out any suggestion that that Gandhi, who was born in Mumbai, had committed suicide. A postmortem gave the cause of death as multiple injuries, while a toxicology report showed no substances that would have affected Gandhi’s driving.
Butler recorded a narrative verdict. “At the time of the impact the speed of the vehicle was 152kmph. The accelerator pedal is recorded as having been depressed fully five seconds prior to the impact but not depressed at all at 1.5 seconds prior to the impact. The steering input data indicates small deviations left and right during the last five seconds. In the eight-and-a-half minute period prior to the collision, Mr Gandhi had been engaged in a phone conversation with Thames Valley police.“The vehicle was badly damaged in the collision but subsequent extensive investigations have not revealed any evidence of the faults described by Mr Gandhi.”