"There was seconds in it and if he'd have hit us, we would all be bloody dead, for sure."
That was a passenger's blunt summary after his quick-thinking driver drove up onto the median strip recently as a Canberra family narrowly avoided becoming the latest ACT road victims.
The dramatic dashcam vision revealed just how close the family came to a high-speed head-on collision on Erindale Drive as a car crossed to the wrong side of the road and hurtled toward them at an estimated 130km/h-plus.
Seconds before the Astra rushed past, their car had been pulling out of the left-hand lane to overtake a slower ute. With so little time and few avoidance options, they were barely seconds from a catastrophic crash.
The silver-grey Holden Astra allegedly had been sought by police all weekend after a dangerous driving incident on the previous Friday night.
Police patrolling in Gowrie observed the driver to be "driving dangerously through multiple suburbs, at times failing to give way, and twice disobeying red lights", a police report issued later said.
But as the latest dashcam vision revealed, the driver's conduct in crossing to the wrong side of Erindale Drive on the Sunday was one which could have ended in tragedy.
The Canberra family, who did not want to be identified, were all shaken by the incident.
The Erindale Drive high-speed near-miss came almost a year after an incident on Hindmarsh Drive, in which 20-year-old Matthew McLuckie was the blameless victim of a head-on crash allegedly triggered by unlicensed 20-year-old Shakira Adams, whom police claim was travelling on the wrong side of the road at an estimated 177km/h.
Adams is now facing charges of manslaughter, culpable driving causing death, aggravated reckless driving, driving a vehicle without consent, and unlicensed driving. She has not entered pleas to these charges, which have been referred to the ACT Supreme Court.
A judge will conduct an inquiry into whether the Bruce woman has the mental capacity to answer the charges.
That critical incident was one of the key triggers for an ACT Assembly inquiry into dangerous driving. There were 28 recommendations from the inquiry, and the government has four months in which to respond.
Incidents in which drivers cross to the wrong side of the road and drive up on footpaths to force police to abandon pursuit have escalated dramatically in recent years. Privately, police concede offenders deliberately use these dangerous driving tactics to shake off a "tail".
The Mother's Day incident was captured by the Hyundai i30N's inbuilt front and rear dashcams.
About 2.14pm, the family of four were on their way to Kambah on the Erindale Drive dual carriageway after having a lunch at a Fyshwick bakery, when the driver spotted something odd on the downhill section of road ahead.
It looked like a car was heading straight toward them.
"Just before this [incident] happened, we had moved out into the right-hand lane and overtaken a slower ute towing a trailer," said the father, who had been sitting in the back seat.
"My daughter's boyfriend was driving and he's a very careful driver, thank Christ.
"He [their driver] suddenly started to run up the gutter to the right and I could hear him swearing and carrying on and asked him, 'What's up'?
"He said, 'There's a car coming up the road'! The next thing is this car flies past us on the wrong side [of the road]."
The offender appeared to not even ease off the accelerator as he barrelled between the Hyundai and the utility and disappeared down Erindale Drive. A contingent of police vehicles, with warning lights flashing, also appeared in the dashcam vision a short time later, giving chase.
"He [the offender] was going so fast that our car rocked on its wheels as he went by," the witness said.
"It was bloody scary, that's for sure. There was seconds in it; if we had pulled out to overtake the ute just a couple of seconds later, it would have been a head-on crash, no doubt about it.
"And at those combined speeds, would we have survived it? I don't think so."
Ryan Tonna has been charged in connection with the incident.
When he faced court he was remanded in custody to appear again on June 26. He has not entered pleas.
