Escape from a locked car

[Bob Eager]

Lots of discussions about the problems inherent in what3words.

[Bob Eager]

I've seen at least one example where the two locations were close enough to be plausible, but far enough away to be dangerous.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I am not saying its a low hazard situation.

There was nurse who disappeared one night. Just vanished.

about ten years latrer they found her volvo in a lake, on a bend on te A10 just north of Cambridge. She has simply gone straight on, missed the chevrons and ended up under 10 ft of water., Probably asleep at the wheel - end of a long shift at Addenbrookes.

This was Volvo 240 period IIRC - no electric locks

It's bloody hard to get out of a car under water and the real advice is that your bests chance is to wind the windows down before it sinks. if you can and then once its sunk open the doors or climb out the windows. OK ArtStudents? are going to die,. because naturally they shut the windows to keep the water out...

I agree. several people a year die on the Cambridge drains - its bloody scary driving out in the middle of the fens with a deep drain - like 30 foot wide and 15ft deep - alongside the road and no barriers at all...

<https://www.google.com/maps/@52.5811385,0.0933767,3a,75y,265.83h,59.87t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sRRBn8Gy0QuClyp4FKDW1sw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656>

[Bob Eager]

Try:

///ashes.string.take

and

///ashes.string.takes

9 miles apart

[NY]

W3W is a great idea, but badly implemented. You'd think that they would deliberately avoid using both singulars and plurals, or words that sound similar to each other.

The satnav in our Honda (using Garmin software) has an emergency mode which gives both a latitude and longitude and a description in words of the form "On A64, near the junction with the Scotchman Lane".

All these methods of communicating your location depend on one key thing: the emergency operator being able to make use of your location and not asking for stupid information. When the "M1 A 123.4" emergency location signs began to be erected on motorways and trunk roads (around 2008), I happened to see an accident on the opposite carriageway. Other people had stopped, but just in case no-one had phoned it in, I rang from my mobile (on hands free). I said something like "Accident on northbound B carriageway of M1. I'm travelling south on the A carriageway. I've just passed sign "M1 A

123.4", and the accident is on the opposite, B carriageway about 1 km north of the sign I've just given you". I was asked for the postcode of the address - FFS, random locations on motorways don't have postcodes. What junction had I just passed? No idea: I was in the middle of a long journey and all I needed to know was which junction I had to leave at, which was a long way off. I was a bit exasperated as I pointed out that the emergency signs were there for giving locations in an emergency and yet this person didn't know what to do with the information. I offered to stop at a 100-metre post on the hard shoulder and read out that information - those have been around for a lot longer, so maybe their software would know what to do with that info. "Don't bother," I was told. "My system wouldn't know what to do with that information either." I do hope someone had already called in the accident and got through to someone who was better trained.

I emailed the Chief Constable of the relevant police force the following day to alert them to a serious deficiency in training of emergency operators, and had a very grateful response saying that he'd just listened to my phone call and couldn't fault me on the accuracy of my information, and had identified "an urgent need for improved training". He also set my mind at rest that no-one had been injured (so the delay and confusion hadn't been critical to anyone's wellbeing) as it had been a damage-only accident.

Nowadays with my smartphone with GPS I could have quoted OS grid ref, though I'd have had to stop to do that!

I was impressed when my wife called in an accident while we were driving on the A1 a few years ago. The emergency operator didn't need to be told where we were and said "ah yes, I can see you've just passed the turning to Kirk Smeaton, heading north". The phone had its GPS turned on (we were recording a track on Viewranger) so I wonder if the location is automatically passed to the 999 operator if GPS is enabled. It was too precise to be based on triangulation of various in-range mobile phone masts. If he'd quoted the location of the accident, I'd have said that someone else had phoned in already, but he told us where we were at the time of the call, which was a bit further north, allowing for delays in "d'you think we ought to phone

999?", finding the phone and in dialling 999.

[newshound]

<snipped>

I'm sure your phone GPS hadn't told them. I expect they could see you on the cameras, maybe your phone number had let them guess at your numberplate (from tax renewal on-line), and one of the ANPR cameras allowed them to home in on the vehicle.

[Fredxx]

I do agree with you it's not perfect, and what4words would be a better implementation from a smaller dictionary of 3,000 much simpler words.

[Mathew Newton]

Yes, it's called Advanced Mobile Location (AML). It's been supported in the UK for a number of years now as BT (who run the first line operator assistance centres) were one of its developers.

Google's implementation (in Android) is called Emergency Location Service (ELS) and there's a bit of info about how it works here:

https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-it-works/

[Mathew Newton]

A neat feature in my wife's Fiesta (2013 so getting on a bit for this sort of thing) is that if a situation arises whereby an airbag is deployed a module in the car will automatically call 999 via your bluetooth-paired mobile and report the fact along with the details of the car and GPS location. It'll give an audible warning via the car stereo beforehand giving you the option of preventing the call should it not be required.

[Fredxx]

Many thanks for the post.

I did wonder how it was done.

[Mathew Newton]

I forgot to add that there's no user-accesible satnav in this car, just a GPS receiver accessible only to the Emergency Assistance module.

[Bob Eager]

A good example is 'dicewords'. That has a carefully chosen set of about

7000 words. And there is an improved set around, as well.

[Pancho]

Why not get the phone to broadcast its location to a cloud service. 999 responders could read the location from the phone number.

Actually it appears this is already the case:

As a software developer I found it was normally easier to get applications to talk directly to each other than handle issues related to the various ways a human can mess up inputting information. The more times software expected human input the more this was true.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Most of the time you canhit the rear window with your feet to pop it, take a deep breath and wait for the pressure to equalise then get out, but of course this presupposes you are not injured in the initial crash. Brian

[bert]

No system is infallible, but how many people understand OS grid ref.

[bert]

Learn the NATO phonetic alphabet.

[bert]

GIGO

[Bob Eager]

As I said earlier, pluscodes are simple:

e.g.

9C3XGV24+5G

[Davidm]

turned on. As I'm just on a payg arrangement (not even a contract) I don't normally have it switched on, ever since on holiday one year and loosing £40 of credit overnight when the bloody phone decided to do a software update over a slow link (cruise ship).

[NY]

Yes, that's plausible. But if so, it all happened very quickly:

999: Hello, which service do you need. Wife: Police 999: [pause of a couple of seconds] Hello, police emergency. Wife: I'm reporting a car crash northbound A1. We're... 999: Yes, we can see you've just passed the turning to Kirk Smeaton.

So within about 10 seconds my my wife dialling 999, the police operator had identified our location, either by GPS or by relating her phone number to her car and then seeing that car on one of the ANPR cameras.

How ever they did it, it was impressive.