How’s that for a very unfortunate way to start the day? One man had to stand by and watch as his car sank into the sea, after rolling off the slipway at the ferry queue in Dorset.
The incident was captured on camera, because of course it was. You will find it at the bottom of the page, and the Daily Mail has the extra details: apparently, the man drove his blue Honda HR-V at the front of the queue for the ferry at Sandbanks in Dorset and stepped out of it to take the air.
That’s when something must have gone wrong with the handbrake, because the car started rolling towards the water and eventually became submerged. As you can see in the video, the man’s initial reaction was to run after it and try to stop it, but eyewitnesses talked him out of it. They kept filming, so the only assistance they gave him was of the verbal kind.
“There was a guy on the slipway at the front of the queue for the ferry and he got out of his car to enjoy some fresh air when it rolled down past him,” Paul Tuttiett, one of the eyewitnesses, tells the Mail. “The velocity of the car had overtaken him and he waded into the water and tried to restrain it and we were shouting at him to get back as slipways can be slippery.”
“He tried to get in the side door and pull up the handbrake to stop it and it started floating off,” Tuttiett continues. “You feel for the guy. I would be swearing and cursing but he was very calm.”
Indeed, the man appears very calm, resigned, though he’s clearly upset. The car was eventually pulled out of the water some hours later, with the help of a crane. The damage caused to its interior is unknown at this time.
Elena has been writing for a living since 2006 and, as a journalist, she has put her double major in English and Spanish to good use. She covers automotive and mobility topics like cars and bicycles, and she always knows the shows worth watching on Netflix and friends. Full profile
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