A Lamborghini had to be fished out of an Austrian lake after its owner accidentally reversed into the water.
The 31-year-old motorist confused the brake and accelerator pedals of his £160,000 Lamborghini Huracán, resulting in the supercar meeting a soggy end.
He had just dropped off a friend and was reversing in a car park before the accident. He was able to swim to shore but the vehicle sank 50ft into the lake in Mondsee. The driver was taken to hospital but suffered only minor injuries.
Local police made light of the situation, suggesting the driver may have been auditioning for the role of Daniel Craig’s replacement as James Bond, recalling the Lotus Esprit that could turn into a submersible in the film The Spy Who Loved Me.
The rescue effort took three hours and involved fire crews, a tow truck and a crane.
A police statement said: “He must have mixed up the brake and accelerator pedals and drove backwards into the Mondsee,” police said. “The vehicle sank about 15 meters [49 feet] from the bank to a depth of about 5 meters [16 feet]. The driver was able to free himself from the vehicle and swim to the bank.”
Bernhard Strobl, from the Innerschwand Fire Brigade, said: “A lot of care was required to recover the valuable sports car, but together with five fire service divers, a recovery balloon and a crane truck, my team managed to carefully pull the vehicle out of the lake.”
Earlier this month, an Iraqi motorist who was driving home from Germany to Denmark in his new car, which has a top speed of 320 kilometres an hour and a starting price of $223,000, had it confiscated after being caught travelling at close to twice the speed limit.
The unnamed motorist was caught travelling at 236kph on a stretch of motorway where the top speed is 130kph.
Under a new Danish law, police can seize the vehicles of reckless drivers and auction them off, with the money going into Danish coffers.
The man had bought the car hours earlier in Germany for two million kroner ($310,000).
