A Bangkok Electric Car Managed to Hit a Tuk-Tuk, a Noodle Shop and a 7-Eleven. Sequentially.

Bangkok traffic has always had a certain creative energy to it, a looseness of interpretation, a willingness to treat lane markings as suggestions rather than instructions. But even by the city's generous standards, what happened near Khaosan Road this week deserves some acknowledgement. An electric vehicle — the future of sustainable urban transport, lest we forget — managed to lose control at a roundabout, strike a three-wheeled taxi, demolish a noodle shop, and then, apparently still not finished, crash into a convenience store. Eight people were injured. Two were foreign nationals, because of course they were.

CCTV, which in Bangkok is now essentially omnipresent and more reliable than most other forms of civic infrastructure, reportedly shows the vehicle circling the roundabout at speed before its optimistic trajectory became everybody else's problem. The noodle shop owner, in a detail that manages to be both alarming and somehow very Bangkok, said his relatives had already sensed danger and rushed inside moments before the car arrived. Whether this represents impressive situational awareness or simply the hard-won instinct of someone who has lived in this city long enough to trust their instincts over the road rules, is left as an exercise for the reader.

The electric vehicle question is worth noting, though not in any particularly dramatic way. Thailand has leaned into EV adoption with considerable enthusiasm over the past few years, most of it Chinese-manufactured, all of it sold on the promise of cleaner air and lower running costs. The technology is fine. The roads, the driving culture, the general approach to roundabouts — that's a separate conversation that predates the internal combustion engine by some margin.

Police are reviewing footage and questioning those involved. The noodle shop and the 7-Eleven are no doubt assessing the extent to which their day went differently than planned. The three-wheeled taxi driver, who appears to have been first in a sequence of events he had no part in initiating, is presumably reflecting on the particular randomness of urban life in a megacity. The eight people hospitalised are, one hopes, recovering. Bangkok will, as it always does, absorb this, file it away somewhere between mild curiosity and resigned familiarity, and get on with itself before lunch.