A vet has drowned in her car.
Astonishingly in my car there appears no way to get out from inside if it is locked and/or the electrics are off.
Apparently the answer is to have a device to break the side door glass.
I was looking at:
or
Do they work?, my gut feeling is the hammer would be best.
When I bought a USB charger to fit in my car's 12V socket between the seats, I chose one which was advertised as having a pointed end, designed to break a window if you got trapped inside a locked car. The trick with breaking a window is to strike it near the *corner* of the glass, not in the middle as you might do instinctively. I imagine that a side window (usually just heat-tempered glass) is a lot easier to break than a windscreen (usually laminated).
I hadn't realised that some cars need an electrical supply to unlock the car from inside. I thought they always used a mechanical release from the inside door handle, with that mechanism being disabled only when the car is deadlocked.
In the case of this tragic case of the vet (I was just reading the story before I saw this posting) it is possible that the doors weren't locked, but the pressure of water from outside made it impossible to open them. Mind you, the electric windows wouldn't work without power, and if I became stuck in deep water, I'd leave the doors closed and open a window to escape.
Luckily my phone has a GPS app (GPS Status, by Eclipsim) which can give my location (either lat/long or OS grid ref) so I can read that out to the emergency services.
Irrespective of that, escaping from a submerged (or submerging) car isn't a walk in the park. It may well be that the driver could have perished with the windows broken anyway.
"When she called emergency services, she told the call handler she could not get out of the black Honda Civic, could not see, and said: "I am sinking".
No indication that it was in fact *locked*...
Are you sure? most cars have mechanicall override on electrical locks
The stock advice is to open the windows as soon as you are in a flood. then if you cant open the doors wait until the water is inside the car to the same level as outside
THEN you can open the door
Of course the doors may not have been locked, or they may have been damaged
I would recommend what3words for those circumstances. As an aside it also integrates with SatNavs for those difficult places to find.
How easy is it to smash a window with many tonnes of water on the other side? I would have expected it would absorb some of the shock from hitting it with a hard thing.
Theo
My car has no means to open the boot, on the boot itself. There is a button by the driver's shin, or the remote works. If both fail, then you have to lower the rear seat back, then crawl through to pull an emergency release from inside. I don't know how you would manage that, with a full boot.
It happens that The Natural Philosopher formulated :
The crash detector puts the hazards on and unlocks the doors.
That's why it's recommended to wind down or smash a window whilst still floating.
Automatic centre-punch? It's the preferred choice of many thieves.
A friend of mine has one of these.
Keep it simple. Assuming you can swing the thing yes.
Being RHD and right handed I don't know how much force I would have. I also prefer the seat-belt cutter with a pull action, rather than 'push'.
...
Although it appears it is not infallible:
....
Why would you need to swing it? You simply push on the end and, when you reach the pre-set loading, the punch is fired forward with enough force to indent steel.
Sorry, I got the two links mixed up. The one my friend has is the hammer type.
The punch one looks nice, except you don't know how much pressure you need to make the punch operate, and I don't like the push-cutter.
The idea is that a simple misspelling of one of the words will be obvious. If the words suggest a different country then you ask again until it's consistent with the known area / land features.
Whereas one digit error in a lat/long or OS ref can mean you're in the right area but still be an unknown distance away.
Except it's not just about having an exit ... you can end up horribly disoriented and simply unable to find the way up. Bearing in mind quite apart from the shock and possible unpreparedness (meaning you didn't stock up on precious air before you sunk) you will be panicking anyway. And that's *before* you start to react to the build up of CO2 that could make you frenzied.
The always watchable "Mythbusters" looked at escaping a submerged car (twice !) and the takeaway message was it was waaaaaaaaaaaaay harder and scarier than you may have thought. Which - given they were doing it in almost lab conditions - isn't a great hope if it happens to you in the dark, on a lonely road when you least expected it.
I don't know if they work, but the one I got some years ago looks identical to the second of these. It fits neatly on the floor near the back of the footwell. It also looks similar to the hammers that used to be provided on many trains and long-distance buses, so I guess the transport authorities tested them at some point. My wife was not entirely persuaded that this was something we ought to have, but they don't cost much. Since most modern cars lock the doors automatically when you start moving and have electric windows, if you didn't realise that you were in a flood until after the battery stopped being able to power the locks and windows, you could just possibly find that smashing a window was the only way out.
Having read the story too, I suspect this unfortunate vet might have been a victim of a satnav: the road seems a really tiny lane barely wide enough for one car not leading anywhere much but could perhaps have been chosen as a short-cut by a badly programmed sat-nav unit. I wish that satnavs had an option to specify "don't take stupid short-cuts to save a few seconds of time".
You adjust the knob on the end to whatever suits you. Given the application, I suggest that should be the highest you can manage. IIRC, the Moore and Wright one was adjustable from 0.5lb (just marks brass) to
9lb (nice indentation on steel).and I don't like the push-cutter.
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