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A middle-aged woman at the wheel of an SUV crashed into three cars and flipped her vehicle upside-down Tuesday morning on a quiet, one-way street in Toronto.

“You’d never believe that happened,” said Anie Ho, who was sitting in her front room when she heard the crash on Burnfield Avenue near Christie and Dupont Streets in the city’s west end.

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“She was very lucky.”

The driver climbed through the smashed window of her Mercedes and walked up to her house unscathed, Ho said.

Judging from the neighbours’ accounts, a dishevelled garden and the tread marks on the street, this was a parking job gone spectacularly awry.

The driver was attempting to park in the laneway beside her house, but instead drove through a bush and onto the front lawn, destroying a decorative pond. She put the vehicle in reverse and it sped out of the driveway, clipping the car parked at a neighbour’s house across the street. It continued on, curving sharply back towards the driver’s house before flipping between two parked cars, both of which were damaged.

The driver’s son said it was a transmission issue.

“It’s the gear-shifter or something,” said the man, who would not give his or his mother’s name. “Something locked and it didn’t drive properly. The car was basically out of control.”

Toronto police would not comment on the accident Tuesday, saying the investigation was ongoing.