Scariest moment of 23 years driving
 

Ive been a Service Eng for 21 years now ,covered tons of miles day and call out at stupid o'clock in the early hours..but yesterday was prob the scariest moment off all ......about a mile from the M4 Tormarton junction east bound i noticed billowing thick white smoke crossing all 6 lanes and into fields from a car on the hard shoulder on the west bound side .Obviously every body slowed down to a crawl .i was in the middle lane with a car transporter about 100 yds behind me and a luton type van on my left ..with the window down i looked over as you do at the car about 100 yds before the smoke ..A fairly new BMW 5 series, the guy was out the car frantically to get stuff out the it !!..
The Engine was screaming at max revs and the white smoke was coming out the exhaust..At this point i entered the smoke about 10 mph,the window still down a bit i could smell it was diesel but looking forward i could not see a thing,not even the end of the bonnet !!
..i had no sense of speed apart the speedo ,i had no sense if i was even still in the lane ,then i thought am i going fast enough for the transporter not to hit me ,or am going to fast to hit the car in front ...
As i was thinking this this almighty bang to my left happened ..there was no sound of skidding before hand just an almighty bang .........then i thought christ ive a car transporter behind me somewhere ..and hearing the bang made me panic big time ... a few seconds later we emerged from the smoke (prob about 40 ft in all)..........looking over the luton van had gone in the back of a 405 estate .. shunting it badly .all rear windows smashed and crumpled badly(write off for age of it ) ,drivers looked ok Luckily..they both managed to pull over on the hard shoulder ....i had to get off the next Junction to calm down ....,for that spilt second i thought i was about to die by a car transporter and my girls 15+13 lose there father .....scary moment :(

Must admit that I am quite jaded by by many driving scare stories but that does sound genuinely worrying.
I'm glad you're OK

Should kept your foot down and carried on through it quickly :)

By knowing what was in front of you before you could have blasted through .. ;)

My guess is the car to your left panicked and braked ..

I have had exactly the same sort of experience with smoke on a motorway - you really cannot tell you are moving or what direction you are going in, it completlely flumoxed my senses. I slwoed to a craw and kept the wheel straight and luckily came out the other side in one piece - it really shakes you up.

tbh i am a bit puzzled by this. i drive a wagon for a living so i am also on the road all day 5-6 days a week. forgive me if i have read this wrong but , if it was me, on seeing the thick smoke ahead of me, i would of stopped short and created a tailback, putting hazards on straight away. however if the smoke did not look so thick upon entering and then you were surrounded i can understand your need to not stop. not having a pop, just seems that everyone was pre-occupied looking at what was going on and before they knew it they were also part of the problem and in danger. regardless, s4it happens, and glad to hear you were ok.

Like Days of Thunder!

I had similar a few years ago whilst overtaking an artic on the motorway. The diseasal corsa infront of me expired in a thick cloud of smoke. A real brown trouser moment!

Strangly enough, I saw another BMW diesel on the side of the motorway at Warrington with its throttle jammed on full and pouring white smoke out of the exhaust. The engine blew just after I passed with an almighty bang and caught fire. Coming back 20 min later (after a local delivery) the FB and Cops were there putting it out. That was a 58 plate as well.

German engineering, right? :rolleyes:

Why didn't he just turn the engine off?

Run away diesel; runs off its own engine oil so you can't switch them off.

Only way to stop them is to put it in 5th and dump the clutch to stall the engine (not possible on an auto), block the air intake with rags, or let it run out out of oil and blow up.

Quite a common failure for any ANY diesel - either from being overfilled, blown turbo, pressurised crankcase, or holed piston/melted ring lands due to duff fueling (dodgy injector, either causes piston to over heat and melt or fills the sump with diesel).

I think you did the right thing anyway, but I would have felt just as worried myself. All you can do is to crawl through as you did and hope all is well behind you.

Les

Yeh i did think of stopping to a halt but others in front went through it seemingly ok, prob not knowing how dense it was until they got into it .....
The Runaway diesel thing makes sense ,as i thought to myself ,why don't you turn the bloody engine off you idiot !!..
Next time i'll pull over on the hard shoulder and wait i think..Thankyou all :)

I once drove through a patch of fog on the M6 and couldn't see my own bonnet. I put one wheel on the cats eyes and kept it there, hoping for the best. It must have only been a few hundred yards thick, but as I emerged I looked around to see how others had faired and there were cars straddling lanes and onto the hard shoulder all over the place. Thankfully, everyone seemed to have slowed on approach and then maintained a steady speed through it. If anyone had panicked and slowed too much, or even stopped, I don't doubt there could have been carnage.

There might have been a fault which prevented him from turning the diesel engine off. He certainly had some kind of bad trouble going by the description.

Les

You have my sympathies I had similar on the autobahn.
Sheet rain during a warm day - you know that freak stuff that you cant see through.
Lorries to one side of me, people flying along still.
Girlfriend without telling me stuck all the air con and demisters on. The whole car misted up every window within a fraction of a second. So I had no warning, someone might have well have painted the windows black - in the middle lane of an unrestricted autobahn, with lorries all around in sheet rain. big brown trouser moment, I was just waiting to be hit or hit something.

Scarieist moment was somersaulting and barrel rolling and coming to and realising I was miraculously still alive and then realising I was stuck up side down in a ditch and hearing the heat of the engine pinging away and the smell of lots of fuel......