

Rachael D'Amore, CP24.com





A dashboard camera caught a frightening incident on Highway 401 on Wednesday-- a tire coming loose from a vehicle, bouncing across several lanes of traffic and smashing into the rear window of another car.

Don Williams told CTV News Toronto he was heading eastbound on the highway, back to his home in Barrie, at around 10 a.m. when he spotted something from the corner of his eye.

“Out of my peripheral, I saw a bouncing tire coming from the collector’s lanes,” he said.

“It bounced right over. I actually thought it was going to hit me.”

In Williams’ dashboard video, the wheel can be seen rolling across the collector lanes before crashing off the guardrailand going airborne. Itthen bounces into the express lanes, goes airborne once more and slams down onto a vehicle, shattering its rear window.

“Then of course everybody hit the brakes pretty hard,” he said.

Williams pulled over out for safety, putting the damaged vehicle directly in view of his dashboard camera.

The car’s roof appears dented and the window is completely blown out.

The video shows the driver get out of his car to inspectthe damage, along with the driver of a vehicle that was travelling in front of him. Williams said that vehicle was also hit by the tire at some point. Both drivers appear to be unharmed.

“It was pretty scary because when the tire is bouncing you really don’t know where it’s going to go,” he said. “You don’t know if it’s going to bounce toward you, there are cars behind you and it’s really tight near the Highway 400 turn off, so if I hit the brakes hard, I’d get rear-ended as well.”

In the video, Williams can be heard calling Ontario Provincial Police to report the incident.

While he’s had the dashboard camera for about two years, he said it’s the first time he’s ever caught something like this.

“There’s a lot of crazy drivers out there, as you know, and a lot of unsafe vehicles. Obviously there was something unsafe about that vehicle to have that tire fall off and bounce across like that,” he said,

“I think it helps to be tuned into your environment and what’s happening around you, and get ready with quick reactions… but there’s a lot of luck involved too. I think everybody today was pretty lucky.”