A former CTV Newsnet anchor now working in Chicago was shocked when a vehicle slammed into the street-level studio where he was broadcasting Sunday night.

Ravi Baichwal's response was to look to his right in disbelief and exclaim "whoa!" when the minivan slammed into the building, jarring the studio and shaking up the 10 p.m. newscast just one minute after it began.

"I challenge anybody to kind of completely look straight at the camera when something like that happens. Our big fear, of course, was that people were standing where the car came in," Baichwal told CTV's Canada AM on Monday.

No one was hurt by the Mazda MPV minivan, which crashed right into WLS-TV's downtown studio and came within about seven metres of the anchor's desk where Baichwal was sitting.

"Luckily nothing happened there, and the weirdest thing was that it's very cold here in Chicago and so as soon as it happened, all of a sudden you could smell the street, you could feel the cold from the air," he said.

"I was waiting to see if somebody was hurt and (thought) 'is this car going to explode? When's the other shoe going to drop?'"

After the initial shock of the crash, Baichwal delivered the entire 30-minute newscast, telling Canada AM "the show must go on."

"You know what it's like when all of a sudden the journalists are part of the story," Baichwal said. "We tried to stay out of it as much as possible but it was just one of those situations where it was too visual and you had to stay with it. Like I said, thank goodness nobody was hurt."

The studio is on State Street, a busy roadway which Baichwal said can be compared to Toronto's Yonge Street in terms of traffic.

Witnesses have told the station that someone was circling in their car outside the studio. There is no word whether the crash was intentional or accidental.

A police spokesperson told The Associated Press it was not immediately clear why the driver of the vehicle with Indiana license plates slammed into the reinforced glass wall.

Emily Barr, president and general manager of ABC-7, told AP the incident may have been intentional, but they couldn't be sure.