CCTV footage circulating via NewsX and The Sun shows a white hatchback slowly driving across a tiled parking area in Maharashtra, India, brake lights fully illuminated, before the front wheels drop into an open elevator shaft and the entire vehicle disappears into the darkness below.
The clip, timestamped to early August 2026, has the quality of something you'd watch through your fingers. The car doesn't lurch or skid – it just keeps going, steadily, as if the driver hadn't realized the floor was about to run out. The back wheels tip upward as the rear falls, and then it's gone. An on-screen text overlay confirms the driver was taken to hospital following the fall.
Per Asianet Newsable, the incident took place in Mumbai on August 4, 2026, in which a driver missed a turn while attempting to park and the vehicle plunged roughly 25 feet into a shaft where a parking lift was under construction. A wooden barrier was supposed to block the opening, but the vehicle broke straight through it. Witnesses nearby reported hearing the impact when the vehicle hit the bottom. Emergency crews pulled the driver out and transported him to a local hospital. "He is currently undergoing treatment, though the extent of his injuries has not yet been confirmed," per Asianet Newsable.
Mumbai has a grim track record with car elevator shafts specifically. An earlier tragedy at Iqbal Heights, a 22-floor building located in Mumbai's Agripada area, claimed the lives of a teenage boy, aged 14, and a family driver when their car plunged two floors down a car elevator shaft, as reported by the Deccan Herald. In May 2025, a parking lift at a 21-story building in Borivali West collapsed into a seven-meter pit, trapping two men inside, per the same outlet.
According to figures gathered by LiftInverter.com from documented elevator incidents spanning 2022 to 2026, unguarded shafts and fall-related accidents represent one of the deadliest recurring hazards in the data – responsible for five of the twenty incidents on record and linked to every one of the three child deaths captured in the dataset. Falls into unguarded or inadequately guarded shafts, combined with entrapment between lift cars and doors, represent the majority of serious outcomes.