An eight-year-old boy has been praised after taking control of a car at 60mph and steering it to safety across a busy dual carriageway when his mother blacked out at the wheel.
Ben Hedger’s mum, Lauren Smith, was driving him home from school when she had a seizure on the A120 near Colchester, in Essex.
The Ford Ka hit the central reservation before Ben put on the hazard warning lights and guided the vehicle across the lanes to the hard shoulder.
Miss Smith said: “When I started having the seizure at first I grabbed the wheel and was steering erratically so because of that we moved from the left lane into the central reservation and crashed into that.
“We were scraping along and that is when Ben realised he needed to do something.
“He put the hazards on, grabbed the steering wheel and steered us to the hard shoulder where we continued along until the car stalled.
“We would have died”
“He realised something was wrong with me but he didn’t realise he had done this amazing thing.
“He said he just did what he had to do otherwise we would have died.”
Once stopped, Ben tried to use his mother’s phone to call the emergency services before another car stopped to help.
Miss Smith, who came around after a few minutes, said she had never had a seizure before and had to be told about what had happened by Ben, the emergency services and a fellow driver.