Six-tonne truck with no driver rolls backwards across busy intersection

A truck driver is thankful a careless mistake which saw his six-tonne vehicle roll backwards across a busy Melbourne intersection with no driver into the path of cars stuck at traffic lights was not deadly.

Delivery driver Navdeep Singh said the truck's battery went flat this morning and he had called for help.

He said he put the heavy vehicle in neutral and released the handbrake while a mate was applying jumper leads.

The six-tonne truck then reversed backwards across Burwood Road in Hawthorn this morning, directly into the path of traffic stopped at a red light without a driver in the vehicle to apply the brakes.

"It was quite scary," victim Eden Jones told 9NEWS.

"Like you just seen a truck coming and it was like, 'is this going to stop?' Nope. There's no one in it to stop it. You had to try and get out of the way and couldn't get out of the way."

The delivery truck only came to a stop after it slammed into a shopfront.

Two staff members in the shop at the time narrowly escaped serious injury.