Bloke crams 13 into Volvo S70

So why did the police get involved at all?

If he was only a danger to himself and his passengers, who cares?

"serious dramatic overloading"

Sounds like a Ken Brannagh treatment of Richard III.

Mine's the one with the fake hunchback.

Gross?

Surely he's 131 shy of gross overloading?

Seems fair to me

So when an off duty police chief drives at 90mph endagering the lives of many others he wizzes past he gets a 42 day ban and £350 fine. Then you would totally expect someone going at 20mph and a few extra passengers gets a 12 month ban and £1000 fine.

Dramatic?

'...he'd stopped the vehicle for "serious dramatic overloading".'

Were they thespians? (If so, did they like straight men?)

Legal limit?

What's the legal situation here? I know that it's not necessarily illegal to have more passengers than seatbelts, but do they all have to have seats (or at least be sitting down) or can someone be sitting in the boot?

Pff.. only 12 and mostly children?

That's nothing! They're mostly children!

I once had 9 fully grown adults in a Volvo 440 :-)

Me driving, two in the passenger seat, 5 in the back and one in the boot.

Amateur!!!

Obviously not been to India.

In Delhi I saw Mum, Dad and 3 kids on a Scooter, In Hyderabad at least 13 on a TukTuk (Moto)

In a Volvo S70 they would get a whole busload and Livestock!!!!

Stupidity isn't a defence

In his defence, Gniwosch said he'd been "driving sensibly at no more than 20 mph", and added: "I'm not a quick driver, I'm a slow driver. I've been silly in what I've done, but not dangerous."

Yes, that's fine, but it won't stop another car, a large 4x4, van etc rear ending you with a closing speed of 40mph or more. People do drive drunk, don't pay attention, etc.

If that had happened, you'd understand the meaning of the term 'meat grinder'.

You fucking retard.

He's clearly not a physics teacher. Or, given the state of education these days, he might be.

Steven R

Dead vulture, because if someone had crashed into *him*, the occupants would be in a physically worse state than it.

Pah! That's Nothing!

When I was still a sixth-former back in the early eighties, I managed to cram seven of my friends into my mother's BL Mini - two in the front seat (one with their leg in the driver's footwell), three across the rear seat, one lying sideways on the floor beneath the seated guys' feet and one on their laps. We drove a couple of miles quite ok, apart from hitting the chap with the spread legs in the front, in the nuts every time I went into second gear. Eight young lads in the car and if we'd been stopped we'd have just got a rollicking from Plod.

Volvo S70? bet you could get at least twenty in there if you tried.

Hardly a record..

We've had 9 adults in a fiat shittychento a few years ago and the Volvo has to be at least double the size..

I think he should get an award.....

.... for "Greenest car sharer". It would certainly be a way of beating the Congestion Charge as well!

Mine is the one with the five passengers in each pocket.

Overloading? What about seat belts?

Isn't there all sorts of legislation about children having to be fitted into child seats or booster seats?

Six kids standing and sitting in the centre rear section must be six counts of 'not safely restrained' or whatever.

Also, didn't mention if there was a passenger side airbag, which could have been well dodgy for the child in the front.

The police request to confiscate the vehicle seems mild, given the circumstances.

I would have thought there could have been lots of charges in addition to gross overloading.

...and this idiot is a school teacher????

Pic, for the curious

Here's the car:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Volvo_S70_.jpg

Spoilsports

They counted a couple of infants in the tally. That is cheating...

During the mad boozing week that followed the high school proms the year when I graduated we got stopped for gross overloading with 15 people in the car at 3am. The cop could not believe his eyes so he had us lined up on the road side to count us up. That was 15 teenagers in an old Volga estate. The cop let us off after finding out with dismay that the driver was absolutely sober (this was in the wild East, I would not expect to get off so lightly in Health-n-Safety paranoiac UK).

I'm confused

He was driving illegally, right? In that case, how did the speed camera catch him if he was only going 20?

Traffic officer PC Roger Brazel

Hang on a sec,

This has GOT to be a hoax. There is absolutely no way this could really have really happened.

No seriously - in North London there is no such thing as a 'Traffic Officer'. I've lived here for 10 years or so and never ever seen one. Seems they've all been replaced by speed cameras, of which there are quite a few.

@Steven Raith, well done mate, I'm right with you!

Every person in a car must have their own seat with a belt and it's the driver's responsibility to enforce it or take the consequences.

All you prats who're boasting about how many you've crammed in a car, you really are the sort of people who need to be taken out to a road crash site and shown the full horror of what a road accident is like. Lacerations, broken and torn off limbs and litres of blood everywhere, the awful sound of people, especially children, screaming.

Get serious, get sensible or get off the roads!

Hang about, the BBC have added some mitigating info....

This is from the BBC website....."The court heard Abraham Gniwosch had been driving for five years "....

....so if 9 of them were infants then he could surely have argued that when he set out 5 years ago, there were only 4 adults in the car........

Paris.....I'd have her in the back of my car....and over the bonnet......

That's nowt

My friends and I once crammed 13 people into a Mini Clubman for a trip to Richmond ice rink.

Mark, Physics much?

"If he'd crashed or someone crashed into him, they'd have been little (if any) safer in a minivan with 12 seats (where some of the seats are small pokey temporary ones)."

Clearly kinematics isn't your strong point.

In a minivan [or a minibus, more realisitically - but I know what you mean] everyone has an individual seat, and these days, legally, a seat belt. It's not perfect, but if someone [say an off duty police car coming around a blind bend at 70mph with a dab of oppo lock on] rear ends you, you at least have less of a chance of being thrown around the cabin like soft, fleshy ping pong balls. Or your face ripped open along a the fragments of a broken side window, etc. Which is almost a certainty if you aren't secured. Which if you overload a vehicle, is what some people will be.

Young kids don't have a choice in the matter, it's the adults responsibility to make the choice for them and ensure they are safely seated in a car.

You complete mong. Have you ever been in even a minor shunt without a belt on? Read up on Newtons Laws of Motion.

I'm not saying the guy should be hung, drawn and quartered - but a bit of public ridicule at his clear lack of understanding of what is 'reasonably safe' and what isn't wouldn't go amiss.

Cheers AC 1605, looks like it's you, me, and only a few others getting the point here.

AC 1547, your ability to read is staggeringly poor, perhaps you were taught by Mr Gniwosch?

"Abraham Gniwosch, of Tottenham, was pulled on 8 August last year in ***Llandudno, Conwy***, the BBC reports. Traffic officer PC Roger Brazel told Llandudno magistrates he'd stopped the vehicle for "serious dramatic overloading".

Since when was Llandudno in North London?

Steven R

Nah...

If he had crammed four Americans in the Volvo, then I would be impressed...

@So why did the police get involved at all?

Wow, this has to win some kind of award for stupid AND complacent at the same time:

>"If he was only a danger to himself and his passengers, who cares?"

First off: he wasn't. He was a danger to everyone around.

Second: even if there hadn't been anyone around, how the hell do you get that it's ok to endanger a bunch of little children who don't get to have any say in whether they're loaded into this deathtrap or not? If he was only a danger to HIMSELF, that would be ok. Being a danger to other people is EXACTLY the point at which the state, the law, and everyone else has a right to butt in.

Surely

"Gross overloading" should be judged on the weight of people in the car, not on their number. I can quite imagine it would be possible to find 4 adults who weigh more than the occupants of this car (given that many of them were small children). Yet presumably it'd be quite legal to transport the heavier adults. Daft.

They should have been done for not wearing seat belts (unless the Volvo has 13 seat belts of course).

Our record

is 10 teenagers/twenties into a Ford Cortina back in the 80s. Brother was driving; his mate in the front passenger seat with gf on his lap; 4 of us crammed in the back seat, 2 with gfs on laps, plus one in the boot. We travelled about 32 km(about 20 miles for you Brits/Yanks) like this at 30 kmh (19 mph) with the tyres scraping the wheel-arches, and the poor old car was never quite the same afterwards! Never saw a cop on the way either...

Way back when...

...motor racing was dangerous and sex was safe, 'twas said that the reason the big Jaguar saloon was called the Mark X was because that was the number of adults it could carry.

Paris coz she could sit on my lap if she asked nicely.

hypocracy

If the police want to see "serious dramatic overloading" they should try looking on any peak-time train on the Paddington line.

Despite the fact that I have paid half the GDP of a small African nation for a seat, I am frequently forced to travel crammed into the aisle or those porch areas where the carriages join (and where the train is most likely to break apart in the event of a high-speed derailment or collision).

Why does the law see it as perfectly safe and reasonable to transport thousands of commuters in those conditions at speeds approaching 100MPH every day on one of the busiest rail lines in the country, but take a dim view of someone carrying a dozen people in similar circumstances in a volvo travelling at 20MPH on a back road in Wales?

Don't get me wrong - I believe that this guy should have been prosecuted, but only because there were children in the car who could not reasonably be expected to weigh up the risks involved. But by the same measure First Great Western should also be prosecuted. In fact what they do is worse because they are transporting paying customers and routinely put their passengers at risk for the financial gain of cramming a few more on.

@a ban for that!

Well, the guy is lucky. Nowadays in totalitarian UK, it's easy to get shot at for such a "serious dramatic overloading" on the grounds of anti-terror laws !

Terrorists completely won in 2005.

That's nothing...when I was a kid...

..aged about 13 or 14, I was one of the 15 Gaelic football team members who got into a Volkswagen Beetle for a 6 km drive to the match in Connemara. Oh and the teacher got in too, to drive us there.

@Dave

To this poster and all others who seem to be ignorant of the laws of physics.

Imagine a flatbed truck with 12 unsecured objects on it, each weighing in at at least 30 kilos. Then imagine the truck involved in a collision. What happens to the load?

Then imagine putting the 12 objects on seats and putting them behind 1/4'' sheet of glass. I dont know about you but, i would think a 30 kilo kiddie missile constitues a risk to other people. Seatbelt laws for rear occupants were primarily brought in to prevent killing people sitting in front of them and people in the way when they went flying through the windscreen.

Idiot alert!

Andy Stewart is clearly an idiot, of course there was such a car as the Volvo S70... has he never heard of Google?!

Clearly a hoax

It's clearly a figment of the rozzers imagination, as there's no such thing as a Volvo S70!

Pah! Rubbish!

Beat 7 in a clio on the way back to Sheffield from a rave in Milton Keynes!

8 & a dog in a reliant scimitar

A long time ago I was one of eight in a Reliant Scimitar. There was only one child (in the luggage space, with a dog.)

We travelled about 7 miles.

Idiots

Everywhere.

Have I been involved in stupidly over-loading a car ?? Yes, 8 in a Mk3 Escort and 7 in a Mk1 Golf. I was old enough to know better, but all those involved still look back on those moments with fond-ness.

Would I do the same today ?? Probably not. I like my licence and the roads today are very different to the roads those incidents took place on.

So, to all those going "oh dear god, you're all so stupid to be bragging about such things", many of those are sarcastic and many are harking back wistfully to days gone by. Get a grip. Most of the cars mentioned that took part in these incidents are 15+ years since they've been usable cars (one mentions an Austin 1100 for fucks sake, that was my *dad's* first new car).

To put this into context, think of the number of famous faces, done for doing 100+ on the M1 and the like, given a £300-£400 fine and 6 month ban. Then we have a teacher, who overloaded his car, drove slowly on what was most likely a quiet country lane and he gets a £1000 fine and a 12 month ban.

The former can easily afford both the fine and the lack of transport, the latter has just had to fork over 5% of his salary.

13, 9 of them children? That's nothing

Back in about 1998 the Jamaica Observer carried a story about the gentleman who drove home from a New Year's party with 12 passengers, all of them adult, in a Toyota Starlet... and not one of the four-door models, either. Apparently there were 3 in the front, including the driver, 5 in the back, and 4 more in the boot with the hatchback open. He went around a known dangerous corner (some kind soul had labled it Killer Corner, with a skull and cross-bones on a bright red background after the third fatal accident there, some time before this incident; the sign was still there the last time I went by, rather faded but present) much too quickly and had a slight head-on with a minibus going the other way. Oops. IIRC three dead and four severely injured. Killer Corner strikes again...

According to the Observer, the police dispatcher had quite some difficulty in understanding that the minibus was empty except for its driver, and the Starlet had 13 aboard.

Dead bird for obvious reasons.

Bah

9 in a Triumph Herald back in the late 80's - times were hard and not everyone could afford walking to the local pub.