Photo: Nick Monro
After a death on a construction site, a coroner's report has called a braking system found in some 70,000 vehicles around New Zealand "inherently unsafe". Waka Kotahi disagrees.
Every time Selwyn Rabbits hears of a vehicle accident in the news, his first fear is that it is the same dodgy brakes as those on the runaway vehicle that killed his son nearly eight years ago.
"You get an instinct," Rabbits says, a former military engineer and director of crane company Lifting Management.
His son Graeme Rabbits was crushed in January 2018 when the brakes failed on a telehandler, which rolled down a slope and pinned him against a concrete mixer at a construction site in west Auckland where he was working.
Selwyn started investigating soon after Graeme's death and discovered several fatalities caused by vehicles with cardan shaft brakes since 2010.
The brakes are in around 70,000 vehicles in New Zealand, they are
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