A £400,000 supercar has plunged into a deep valley after the hapless driver allegedly forgot to apply the handbrake.
Dramatic footage shows the rare Dallara Stradale slowly rolling off a slope and plunging into the valley as its driver sprinted after it in vain.
He ran out of a cafe and tried to stop the runaway car with his bare hands, but it gathered speed and vanished over the edge.
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Witnesses yelled “did you apply the handbrake?” and “why is it rolling?”
As the unoccupied supercar slipped away, he shouted back: “I did apply it.”
Rescuers later found the wreck resting in woodland some 330ft below.
The smashed supercar was winched back to the road after a lengthy crane operation, as reported by Need To Know.
The incident happened at the Shan Hai Ming Zhu scenic cafe on the Beiyi Highway in Yilan, Taiwan, on Sunday morning (13 Sep).
Around half-dozen supercars had been parked on a sloped heart-shaped photo spot.
The green limited-edition Dallara Stradale, one of only 600 built worldwide and registered in Taiwan just a month earlier, was rented by a man named Zhang.
Police spokesperson You Yi-lun said officers were called at about 8am after “a small passenger car rented by Mr Zhang slid off the roadside slope”.
He confirmed nobody was hurt.
Police have not officially blamed a forgotten handbrake and said the exact cause is still being checked.
The car uses a traditional mechanical lever rather than an electronic park brake.
Zhang later told officers he did not want to file a full accident report because no other vehicles or members of the public were involved.
He was said to have collapsed in shock afterwards, muttering: “This car is rented.”
Repair bills are expected to run well into tens of thousands of pounds and the specialist car may have to go back to Italy, with some local reports putting top-spec examples at far above the £400,000 starting price.
A similar mishap struck the same beauty spot last year when a Mercedes rolled off the slope.
Police have urged drivers to double-check the handbrake before walking away.
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