Trial EV Accident: Driver Says Was Forced to Speed; Video Recorded on Car’s Dashboard Camera | WATCH

A day after four people, including two forest rangers, were killed and a woman warden went missing after an electric vehicle crashed during a trial run in Uttarakhand’s Rajaji tiger reserve, the driver has said he was forced to speed and overload the vehicle. Five others were hospitalised with injuries.

The accident, which took place late on January 8, was recorded in the car’s dashboard camera. In the video, released by PTI and taken from a third party source, a person can be heard telling that he does not want to take a safety risk, and that the “people in the back must get down as it could be risky if there’s a sudden jerk” when the car is speeding up.

The video shows the car gathering speed, and one of the occupants in the car says it is now at 100 — though it is not clear if it is the driver speaking. The car suddenly veers off the road and crashes, evident from the cracked front windshield at the end of the video.

The driver, BE mechanical engineer Ashbin Biju, has said forest officials forced him to overload and speed up during the trial of the all-terrain electric SUV. He said he was neither inebriated nor tired.

Biju further said the first test drive, approved by the forest department of Uttarakhand, took place without any incident but in the second round of demonstration, forest officials forced him to take nine personnel — a total of 10, including the driver — against the seating capacity of eight (including driver).

“The ranger standing at the rear of the vehicle ordered me to go to the Chilla Dam road… and asked me to go to other off-road obstacles as part of the demonstration,” he said, adding they asked him to “accelerate” despite “my repeated requests to not go outside the planned range”.

“I refused to comply 2-3 times and did not accelerate the speed beyond 30-40 (kmph),” he said, adding he “succumbed” to the pressures from the other officer and “gave a little acceleration burst”.

“As it is an electric vehicle the acceleration is fairly high, and it reached a speed of 70 kmph in a fraction of a second,” he said. “Due to loose, unstable roads with mud and dangerous rocks, the tyre burst and the vehicle lost control from the rear and hit a tree sideways before colliding in high speed into the embankment wall between the road and river.”

The driver said he does not remember what happened after. The driver and the co-passenger in the front, who were wearing seat belts, survived the accident, while the rangers and others standing in the rear were thrown off and either died or seriously injured.

EV startup seeks fresh FIR

The electric vehicle startup Pravaig Dynamics has sought a fresh FIR in the matter, saying the one registered by Uttarakhand police on Wednesday ignored critical facts. The Bengaluru-based company, in a press statement, also said it was deeply saddened by the accident.

“We are deeply saddened to report a tragic incident involving a vehicle that was under demonstration via our distributor, one where they were conducting an authorised trial run in Rajaji National Park with the Forest Department of Uttarakhand. We have received reports of the accident and the subsequent casualties leading from a tyre burst,” the company said.

The firm in a statement said the FIR overlooks critical facts, including trial being authorised by the forest department, and that officials overloaded the trial EV and took it off the approved boundary for trial runs. It said the demonstration vehicle was duly authorised by the state forest department for the test drive only within the Rajaji National Park.

“That permission did not allow forest department officials to violate the authorised capacity of our demonstration vehicles (of 8 pax). The forest officials were not allowed to instruct our test driver to trespass speed limits,” the statement said.

“Forest personnel (some in uniform) not only forced our test driver Ashbin Biju (BE Mechanical), to violate the boundary conditions, some of them chose to perch dangerously on the back bumper of our demonstration car and overloaded it, forcing it to go off balance,” the company added.

(With PTI inputs)