A MAN who dived to safety just a split second before his car careered down a steep hillside is now calling for improvements to the road.

Antony Kornas was driving on the North York Moors in a snowstorm when he felt his car sliding off the road towards the edge of the steep, 300-yard slope.

The head of engineering for Siemens Rail Automation, he was on his way to Levisham station, where he volunteers on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

"I recognised that the road conditions in the area were poor so I gingerly crept down the hill at Braygate,” he said.

"As soon as my car got onto the hill it began to slowly slide out of control despite me making every attempt to arrest it. As the road turned towards the right the car continued straight on and towards the valley side.

"There came a point at which I sensed that the car was a lost cause, and knowing the geography well, I knew that I was in the middle of what was to become a very serious incident.

"In a split second I undid my seatbelt, opened the door, and dived onto the road.

"As I looked back I could see the car slowly slipping into the valley. After I stood up, I saw the car bouncing down the valley until it was out of sight. Following that there was an enormous crash, followed by silence.

"The car had embedded itself in a tree."

Since the accident last month the vehicle has been written off by the insurance company - and Mr Kornas now feels the installation of a stretch of crash barrier could stop incidents like this happening again

"I escaped serious injury by jumping out of the vehicle just as it rolled over the edge but looking at the damage things could easily have been much worse on such a treacherous winter's morning,” he said.

"Next time someone could be killed."

A spokesman for North Yorkshire County Council said it had not targeted safety schemes at the site as it has not got a history of personal injury collisions - with none in the last five years.

"The county council has a programme of local safety schemes but these are all addressed at sites with a poor personal injury collision record," said the spokesman.

"The county council is responsible for 9,000 kilometres of road network, one of the largest networks in the country. Inevitably this means that resources must be targeted at those locations with a history of personal injury collisions."