Queenstown police are trying to track down the driver of a rental van who forced an oncoming vehicle off the road on State Highway 6 near Garston.
The Otago Daily Times was shown dashcam footage by Sergeant Chris Brooks, of Queenstown, this morning.
Police were sent the video by a motorist travelling in the same direction as a convoy of white rental vans - it was not immediately clear when the footage was filmed.
The video showed several vans in the lead and another rental van passing a truck to rejoin the convoy.
The final Apollo rental van is then seen overtaking the vehicle with the dashcam fitted, swerving partly in to the correct lane to avoid a collision, then pulling back out to overtake the truck at speed and catch up to the convoy.
A vehicle travelling in the opposite lane had to pull off on to a gravel verge to avoid a head-on collision.
Sgt Brooks said the standard of driving was "shocking", but ''not an unexpected for these roads".
"They are busy [roads] and tourists are trying to reach their destinations in a hurry ... I've stopped people trying to get from Mount Cook to Milford Sound in a day.
"It's pretty hard to change their behaviour because it could be just a one-off visitor.''
Police were grateful to the motorist who filmed the incident and sent it in, he said.
"For them to make that effort, it's great."
Inquiries as to whether or not the driver, who was believed to be Chinese, was still in New Zealand were being made, he said.
Police have contacted Apollo and are locating the driver.
Comments
Not only tourists! This "hetze" against foreigners is embarrassing. We so often see kiwis do the same. Crossing the middle line, endangering incoming traffic.... a daily affair. Be open minded!
We are grateful that drivers license tests are becoming more strict! It was a laugh really!
But but but we are told it is not the tourists who do this kind of thing but the locals.......well this video certainly makes a mockery of that statement.
@nivaman does this video represent every crossing of the center line that day? Does this camera-person submit every digression they film or only those that are deemed more likely to be tourists. Does the driver have the racist bias that the 2014 NZTA report concluded is the truth behind the view that tourist drivers are bad drivers? How can a single event overthrow the years of Police data that disagree with you? And to top it all of nobody ever said tourists don't do this (as you claim), what people are actually saying (by people I mean the Police and NZTA etc.) is simply that tourists are not worse than locals. You're putting false words into peoples mouths.
The statistics are known and factual; a tourist is many, many times more likely to crash than a local driver.
That is an established statistical fact but can be obfuscated by skewed presentation
such as by saying "locals crash a lot more than tourists" based on the fact there are many, many times more locals than tourists in existence at any one time and be correct, giving the impression of a non-issue.
However, if you do the honest thing and narrow the results to tourist hotspots and thoroughfares and remove areas no tourists tend to go from the results then the numbers become astronomically damning.
All of the statistics are openly available.