A car worth more than £800,000 was involved in a
collision with a van before crashing into trees.
The accident occurred in heavy rain on a 40mph section of Renfree Way,
Shepperton, Surrey, on Sunday.
The rare Bugatti Veyron collided with a Vauxhall Astra van carrying a pregnant
woman, who was taken to hospital as a precaution but later went home.
No one else was hurt but police have reported the Bugatti driver for driving
without due care and attention.
Surrey Police said the luxury car was driven by a man who had a male passenger
with him.
A man and a woman were travelling in the Astra.
The accident occurred at 1440 GMT and the road was closed until 1630 GMT.
The eight-litre, hand-crafted Veyron has a top speed in excess of 250mph.
The 1,000 horsepower Bugatti can accelerate from 0 to 60mph in 2.5 seconds.
We only know of one
other time a Bugatti Veyron has been wrecked, and that was during the car's
development when a prototype was destroyed doing a high-speed test. There
was the time a preproduction Veyron performed a very public spin-out at Mazda's
Laguna Seca Raceway during the Monterey Historics. These incidents actually
delayed the debut of the production car, though perhaps it should have stayed in
the oven a bit longer if its designers were worried about stability at speed.
Reports this morning are flooding in of the first known wreck of a Bugatti
Veyron on public roads, and there are pictures to prove it. Very little is known
about the circumstances expect that the crash occured in the U.K. and was
apparently the result of hydroplaning. For a car with an MSRP well over a
million bucks, we assumed that when hydroplaning is detected the car would
immediately enter hovercraft mode, but we now know that's not the case.