INVESTIGATION
"You're driving and suddenly it's a disaster." Four days after the tragedy which claimed the lives of five children on Monday evening on the A7 in the Drôme, the lawyer for the Nicolas Cellupica family, who incriminated on our Renault antenna on Wednesday, confided that he had received around sixty testimonials from drivers Renault Grand Scénic 7-seater who also had problems with the turbo in their vehicle. Among them, Agathe. On the road to the holidays in 2012 near Rambouillet with husband and children, the turbo of his car is racing. She tells her misadventure at the microphone of Europe 1.
"A white smoke not to be seen at 50 centimeters"
"You are driving and suddenly, it's a disaster: you could not see anything on the highway, a white smoke not to see at 50 centimeters. It was really impressive", she recalls. . Unlike Vénissieux's family, four of whose members are still hospitalized, Agathe was able to brake and pull over "immediately on the emergency lane". Fearing that the vehicle could catch fire, Agathe's husband reacted quickly, while the vehicle continued to roar when stopped.
>> READ ALSO - Accident on the A7: the turbo "burned" of the engine at the origin of the fire
A fairly recurring problem with Renault DCI engines
"He managed to remove the belts, take the two children and throw them in the side. It was night, they were barefoot in the rain, in thick white smoke," she summarizes. . Unscathed, the family then calls the competent authorities and the vehicle ends up in the garage. "The mechanic took three days to do his diagnosis and told us that it was the turbo that got carried away and that had caused an engine failure." A known problem on this model seems it, since the mechanic then slipped him that the turbo was "the defect of the Grand Scénic 2".
A recurrence also confirmed by several garage owners, interviewed by Europe 1, on Renault DCI engines, especially those from the 2000s, including recent vehicles that had been running for only a year or two. "I can no longer count the number of drivers that I found stammering on the emergency lane as they were afraid of what had just happened", confides one of them, wishing to remain anonymous.
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The age of the vehicle in question
But as regards specifically the drama of the Drôme, we must also take into account the age of the vehicle, point at the microphone of Europe 1 for Pierre-Louis Champeaux, head of the used service for the magazine Autoplus. "What poses a problem is that we are on a 15-year-old vehicle which we do not know the rigor of the maintenance, nor the general condition before the accident," he says. It is therefore difficult in these "conditions to speak of a design or manufacturing defect", according to him.
And to conclude: "When we are in this type of scenario, the problems manifest themselves well before. There we have reached a deadline which corresponds more or less to the life of the turbo."