Learner tank driver runs over car

Lucky Paul Taylor told yesterday how he escaped as his car was flattened – by a 15-tonne tank.

He was driving down a lane when the huge Army vehicle loomed in his windscreen.



Paul, 42, sat terrified as the armoured personnel carrier – with an L-driver squaddie at the controls – mounted his Citroen’s bonnet, crunched the windows with its tracks, mangled his door then stopped on the car’s roof.

Dad-of-three Paul feared he would be crushed alive and squeezed out through the passenger door.



IT technician Paul, of Blandford, Dorset, said: “The whole front of my car was flat with a tank on top of it.” The tank driver was taken to hospital with shock. He was one of six soldiers of the Yorkshire Regiment on board the tank at the time of the crash in Melbury Abbas, Dorset.

An Army spokesman said: “One of the vehicle’s controls stuck.”