TORONTO -- The OPP says they caught a young driver allegedly speeding at 308 kilometres an hour on the QEW Saturday night.
“This is the fastest speed that I’ve ever heard of,” OPP Sgt. Kerry Schmidt said in a video posted to Twitter Sunday morning.
Schmidt said that the 19-year-old driver was in his father’s car at the time of the incident with another 19-year-old passenger alongside him.
“Unbelievable speeds, we’re talking 191 miles an hour, we’re talking 85 metres a second, 280 feet per second,” Schmidt said, questioning how a driver could properly react to potential obstacles on the highway at those speeds.
Schmidt said that the driver was stopped near Burlington and was subsequently charged with stunt driving under the Highway Traffic Act as well as a criminal charge of dangerous driving.
The driver’s licence has also been suspended for seven days and the vehicle has been impounded for the same amount of time.
“This is absolutely egregious for anyone to be going those kinds of speeds,” Schmidt said. “The speed limit is 100, there’s areas where it’s 110. When you’re going triple the speed limit, I don’t even know where to begin with that.”
“So I’m pretty much speechless on this one.”
The car was going so fast that drivers passing by were “honking in delight” that the vehicle had been stopped, according to Schmidt.
Speeding offences have been on the rise since the COVID-19 outbreak began in Ontario in late January.
In fact, Toronto police confirmed last month that officers have been handing out an unusually high number of speeding tickets. Close to 3,000 speeding tickets were handed out between March 15 and March 31, an increase of roughly 35 per cent over the same period last year.
