An Auckland man has described slamming on his brakes and cradling his head as he braced himself for the impact of a bus careening towards him.
The driver was in the firing line of an Auckland bus driver who lost control of her vehicle this morning and hit a car before careening off the road and smashing into another parked car.
The sickening crash in Bush Rd, Albany, was captured by a CCTV camera at an ITM hardware store.
Stuart Cameron was on the way back from dropping his daughter at school when the bus hit him.
He watched, horrified as the vehicle veered out of the opposing lane in front of him and hit the side rail barrier. It then changed direction and came barrelling towards him.
"It started coming towards me, it was accelerating when it impacted me. I'd say it was going around 75km/h," Cameron said.
"When I realised it was going to hit me I put my knees up and I cradled my head in my hands."
"The windscreen of the bus came out of it and went over the top of my vehicle as it was spinning from the impact."
Cameron said his chest was bruised and he had a small cut on his knee, but was otherwise uninjured following the crash.
The bus had a school sign on the front, he said, though it was unclear which school it might have been coming from.
Witness Gail Turner, from the ITM hardware store, has since reviewed the store's CCTV footage, which captured the crash.
"The bus came down the hill on the wrong side of the road quite fast.
"It seemed to have clipped someone coming down the road. I don't know what made the driver lose control."
The footage shows the bus travelling at speed before slamming into vehicles in a carpark.
Turner said the driver missed a truck coming up the hill by a "hair's breadth" before barrelling off the road and smashing into a tree, and then a worker's car in the ITM carpark.
Police said the crash happened just after 8.20am.
No one was reported injured.
"The bus driver was definitely a bit shaken, but I think the truck driver was the worst."
-NZ Herald