Dad of teen who died on sea link slaps legal notice on Skoda.
Two-and-a-half months after his son Ojas Mehta, 14, was killed in a car crash on the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, his distraught father Kishore Mehta has served a legal notice on Skoda.
Mehta has stated that none of the promised safety measures — particularly the airbags — functioned on the day of the accident in December. “Had the air bags opened, my son would have lived,” Mehta said.
Weeks after receiving the notice, Skoda sent two technical engineers from its Aurangabad unit to Mumbai on Thursday to conduct a joint inspection of the car. It was conducted at the Skoda service centre in Sewri in the presence of Mehta, a family friend and police sub-inspector Patil of Bandra police station. The results of the inspection are likely to come within a week.
On December 8, 2009, Ojas was on his way to school in the family’s Skoda car when the car collided with a taxi, resulting in his death. Mehta, a US-returned mechanical engineer, says none of the safety measures in the car functioned that day.
After grappling with his grief for a month, Mehta dashed off a letter to Skoda in January. Furious when the company did not bother to respond, in late January, Mehta slapped them with a legal notice.
“I had sent a letter asking Skoda to explain why the airbags did not open. When they ignored it, I sent a legal notice through my advocate,” said the 45-year-old Peddar Road resident.
Initially, the company asked Mehta to hand over the car to them, but he insisted on a joint inspection.
Mehta claimed that even during the inspection carried out by the technical engineers, the safety bags, which are supposed to release automatically, did not open. “Also, I was neither allowed to record the proceedings nor click photographs,” Mehta said.
He added that at the time of purchasing the car, the companytouted it as being super safe, with the latest safety measures. “What is the use of airbags if they do not open in an emergency? The engineers did not even clarify my doubts during the inspection,” Mehta said.
Skoda’s technical engineer, Manoj Pawar, who inspected the car, said “The airbags open only if the front portion of the car is hit. But in Mehta’s case, the car was hit from the side at the time of the accident.”
Pawar is expected to submit the inspection report to Skoda shortly. Mehta said after receiving the report, he would also conduct a private inspection.
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