GREATER NOIDA: Amid the parade of new futuristic cars inside the Auto Expo, it was the parking lot that turned heads on Friday afternoon.
Four cars, all belonging to expo visitors, caught fire leading to panic outside
India Expo Mart whose parking lot had around 4,500 cars at the time. The flames were spotted by the guards around 4.05pm. It took a fire tender about 45 minutes to put off the fire. Till 6pm, only one of the owners was aware that of the damage to his car. Two cars were gutted - an Amaze and a Swift. The engine of a white i10 was damaged and an Ertiga had a burnt bonnet.
There were two theories doing the rounds about what caused the fire - a lit cigarette thrown by someone that set fire to dry grass and hay strewn around the parking lot, spreading to the cars, or a short circuit in the engine of a car caused by a battery overload.
A guard deployed at the P1 parking lot, where the fire broke out, said a Zetta was seen speeding away following the blaze, implying its owner had spotted the blaze and taken the car out in the nick of time. "Prima facie, it seems someone left a burning cigarette near the cars," said Swetabh Pandey, circle officer (traffic).
Pankaj Garg, who owns an online sales company in Hisar, told TOI he was told had someone lit a cigarette and the cars caught fire. The i10 was his. The other cars belong to Siddharth Arora (Amaze) of Sheikh Sarai, Satish Bharija (Ertiga) of Dwarka and Anirudh Bhattacharya (Swift) of Faridabad.
A representative of
Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), an organiser of the Expo, said the fire could also have been caused by an overloaded car battery that could have led to a spark in the engine.
It took a fire tender about 45 minutes to put off the fire
