University of Otago student Kevin Lewis said he was putting his leftover meal in the fridge about 8pm when the walls of his Duke St flat started shaking.
He looked around to see a 42-inch television skid to a halt at his feet, and the back end of a car embedded in the flat's ground-floor living room.
The car stopped about 2m from where his flatmate was sitting at the table, eating dinner.
Back at the flat yesterday, after a night at a motel, he said it was hard to recall the exact time the car crashed into the flat.
He understood the 18-year-old woman driver was trying to stop the car while reversing out of a nearby car park and had mistakenly pressed the accelerator instead of the brake.
She was shaken, but not injured, he said.
"It just happened so quickly," he said.
"None of us freaked out - we were all calm.
But I guess we were lucky.
If anyone was over here [in the living room] someone would have died."
The 20-year-old university student, from New Hampshire in the United States, is studying marketing at the university with the Study Abroad programme.
He and his five flatmates moved into the flat only a few weeks ago.
The driver left the car in gear when she jumped out, but a mangled strut appeared to have stopped the vehicle from going any further into the room.
A bystander got in the car and took it out of gear.
The impact spread glass, debris and glass bottles.
Mr Lewis said he and his flatmates had gone to a bar to celebrate "being alive".
They would be put up in other accommodation for a week while builders fixed their flat, he said.
