Nathan Owen got into his Jaguar and headed from Ormskirk, England, north of Liverpool, toward Bolton. But after he began cruising down the highway, it seemed his car would not stop.
“It was just going faster and faster,” Mr. Owen later told The Sun. “The button handbrake, neutral and reverse gears, nothing worked.” He said he feared for his life as the car reached speeds of up to 85 miles an hour, prompting a panicked call to the police, who intervened to help him safely slow to a stop.
More than two years later, however, a court in England has determined that the whole ordeal was faked. Mr. Owen’s automobile was fine; he could have stopped at any time, but staged the brake issues in an apparent attempt to avoid payments on the car.
Mr. Owen, 33, was sentenced in Liverpool Crown Court on Monday to four years and three months in prison after pleading guilty to dangerous driving and fraud charges.
In court, his own defense attorney, Daniel Travers, said the plan was “frighteningly stupid for a man ostensibly reasonably well educated and intelligent,” the BBC reported.
Mr. Owen called the emergency 999 number on March 6, 2024, saying that he was unable to stop his battery-electric Jaguar I-PACE, according to a statement from the Merseyside Police. The police responded and used their own cars to slow Mr. Owen’s Jaguar, which hit officers’ cars more than 30 times as they tried to bring him to a halt, according to the police.
The police said they hit speeds of 125 miles an hour during the pursuit.
At the time, Mr. Owen portrayed the incident as a harrowing, life-or-death ordeal. “I could’ve crashed, it could’ve killed me, it could’ve killed somebody else,” he told The Sun.
But when Merseyside Police and Jaguar Land Rover investigated the incident, Mr. Owen’s version of the story fell apart.
“JLR provided technical support to assist the police investigation, which found no evidence of any vehicle-related defect contributing to the incident,” the company said in a statement.
Data from Mr. Owen’s car showed that it had been completely stopped 30 seconds before he made the 999 call, the police said. It also showed that while the car was moving on the highway, Mr. Owen was pressing the accelerator and never pressed the brake pedal. The car finally stopped because it ran out of battery charge, the police said.
Mr. Owen was in debt and behind on his car payments, the police said, and he had written text messages before the incident discussing how to get rid of the car, including attempting to get it written off.
He was arrested a week after the incident and pleaded guilty in June.
“By his own admission, there were workers on the hard shoulder of the motorway, and he clearly put them and other road users in danger with his reckless actions,” Detective Constable Michael Doyle said in the police statement.
The faked ordeal also angered Jaguar Land Rover, which said in a statement read within the court proceedings that it had spent 50 million British pounds (about $67 million) in an effort to counter the bad publicity caused by the event, The Guardian reported.
Jaguar has been reeling after a cyberattack last August halted its production for five weeks, delivering a $2.5 billion hit to the British economy, according to officials. Last week, the company announced it would lay off 300 people.