City racer, wife charred in BMW crash

Police said the accident occurred around 1.49 am on Saturday when the couple were heading back to their house at Alapakkam near Porur after meeting some friends. 

Initial reports suggested that the two-seater BMW Z4 sports car hit an unilluminated speed breaker at high speed, swerved to the right and hit a tree on the road side. The car got stuck between the tree and a wall and went up in flames within seconds of the collision. Police suspect that the automatic door system and convertible mechanism could have failed in the impact trapping the couple inside the burning vehicle. 

The car continued to burn with small intermittent explosions as public gathered near the spot and recorded videos standing several metres away. An eyewitness, who posted a live video of the burning car on Facebook, was heard saying that nobody could go anywhere near the vehicle as the fire was very intense with multiple explosions. “The heat is so much that nobody can go anywhere near the car and people are moving away due to fear of an explosion. The saddest part is that two people are caught inside the car and have burnt to death,” an eyewitness, Saddy Cena, was heard saying in the video. 

Police are yet to find out the exact reason for the fire. Forensic experts, who visited the site also could not point out the cause. “Our scientific expert visited the site and collected samples. But he could not find the exact reason as the car and the bodies were completely burnt. It would be too difficult to identify the exact reason that caused the accident and the subsequent fire,” a senior traffic police official told DTNext. 

It took several hours for the police to retrieve bodies from the vehicle. The bodies were sent to the Government Royapettah Hospital for a post mortem and were handed over to the family later in the evening.

The BMW Z4 is touted to be one of the safest cars, getting a high rating in the Euro NCAP test. Scoring maximum points in passenger safety with protection of all critical body regions and good all-round safety, the fact that the car became a death-trap for the young couple came as a shock to many. Experts say that high-end cars rarely burst into flames, but this vehicle not just caught fire, but it appears that the locking system also failed in the impact.