What’s Sleek, Speedy and a Home Wrecker?

For 76-year-old Blanche Hokanson Boscow, Thursday started going downhill at 12:15 p.m. when she got into her 1982 Jaguar, which was parked in the garage of her Newport Beach home, and turned the key.

According to police, the car “took off like a shot in reverse,” leaving skid marks on the driveway.

It sped backwards out of the garage, down the driveway, across Bayadere Terrace and part way up an embankment on the other side of the street before it finally came to a stop.

But not quite.

The car suddenly decided to go forward, and, speeding along just as fast as before, it went down the embankment, back across the street, up the driveway and into its garage.

And through the garage wall and across the atrium and through the guest bedroom wall and across the bedroom and into the bathroom before it stopped again, this time for good. According to police, the car came to rest in the exact center of the house.

Police said a neighbor, alerted by what he thought was an explosion, found Boscow still in the driver’s seat and helped her out of the car. She lay down on a bed that was right beside the car to await paramedics.

Boscow, taken to Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian for an examination, suffered only a cut on the leg, Officer Kent Stoddard said.

Investigators said the woman “doesn’t remember hitting the gas pedal,” Stoddard related. A firefighter who got into the car before it was pulled from the house reported that the automatic transmission was then in “park,” Stoddard said.

The destruction in the house was extraordinary, he added. “The only good thing about it was she was not hurt.”