Maruti Esteem car caught fire near Krishna Nagar metro station in East Delhi - Introduction of safety regulations needed in India

A Maruti Esteem caught fire near Krishna Nagar Metro station in East Delhi. Local sources say, Kapil who was driving the Maruti Esteem from Shalimar Bagh to Krishna Nagar suddenly saw smoke coming out of the car and tried to escape but he found the doors of the car locked and did not open.

He was fortunate enough to be spotted by the Metro officials working nearby who came to rescue, broke the window of the car and Kapil was taken out of the car immediately. The fire brigade was also informed in the mean time and reached the spot immediately.

One of the metro officials cleared the road with warning all persons that there could be an explosion and thereby cleared all the traffic and transport.

He said that had the officials not spotted the car on time and evacuated its owner, it could have led to fatalities. Delhi Police officials said that five fire tenders were rushed to the spot and flames were doused. "Nobody was injured," an official said.

Just for the information of all Wheel-O-Maniacs, we have already seen lot of these cases before also - with Tata Nano catching fire, VW Vento, Maruti's Dzire and Alto and even Audi R8. To avoid such instances in future, the Indian government should introduce saferty regulations in India.

Just for an instance, all the vehicle of Nissan Motors in India including even the base variants of Micra and Sunny are equipped with a safety feature which will let you come out of the car (only from Driver's side) even in case of a mishap and even if the door's of the car are locked. To explain, this feature, while a driver is seated in the car and he locks the door using central locking - all the doors of the car gets locked and will not get opened from outside / inside even when door handle is pulled since it is locked, however only the driver's gate / door has the feature that it will never get automatically locked from inside. So, even in case of locking the door, the driver can any time open the door from inside (without being able to unlock the central locking feature).

This feature in Nissan cars at the starting seems to be not of any use - but when you see lot of the fire incidents happening in India, the feature could emerge out to be a life saver. Hats off to Japs for giving importance to safety features even in a cost conscious market like India. 

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