The other night a friend of mine mentioned that he’d heard that you could run over a Nalgene water bottle with a car and it wouldn’t break. Curious about this, I checked the web (a cursory glance, really), but all I found were confirmations of the stories’ existence, nothing about it being true or not. So I reach out to you, fellow Dopers, does anyone know if this is true or not?
PS:
I’ve got a Nalgene bottle, but I’m not running over it with my car…it’s too nice 
Nalgene makes wash bottles and other lab equipment, so I always think it’s strange to see people drink out of something that says ‘Nalgene’ on it. I don’t think it’d be all that difficult for a bottle to survive being run over if it was open. It would be essentially the same thing as squeezing the bottle flat with your hand. The walls of the bottle are strong enough to withstand immense force – you wouldn’t expect a sheet of polyethyene 2 mm thick to be destroyed if it were run over. The bottle would be crushed flat, then would expand again when the tire was no longer on it.
If the bottle were closed, then the air inside would need to escape. I think the cap would open itself, and the air would probably be able to escape in time. If it were full, then the contents would need to leave the bottle, or they might exert enough force on the walls to break it. The water probably wouldn’t leave fast enough through the squirt-top, so the cap would probably come off, perhaps catastrophically. Either that or the bottle would break at its seams, depending on whether the force required to pop off the cap is higher or lower than the force required to break the bottle.
It may also make a difference what the bottle is made of. On the first product page I clicked on, they list bottles made of low density polyethylene, high density polyethylene, and lexan.
The laboratory site also lists bottles of polypropylene, polycarbonate, Teflon, acrylic…
I have a bunch of rigid plastic Nalgene brand water bottles and I have no doubt my truck would crush them like a beer can.
The flexible ones, obviously, would simply deform to flat and then spring back as Roches says.
I have some rigid Nalgene camping bottles and based on how strong they appear to be, I think they would stand a pretty job chance of surviving even if I ran over them with my 7000 lb SUV. They are quite expensive, so I’m not testing this hypothesis anytime soon.
Well, in another forum I visit, one person decided to find out if these Nalgene bottles are as strong as people said they are.
So he shot it.
http://www.network54.com/Hide/Forum/message?forumid=9013&messageid=1061771867
Bah. Don’t kids know anything these days? You’re supposed to fill it up with water* and put the lid on tight, then put a hgh-velocity rifle bullet (preferably hollowpoint) through it. Amateur. :rolleyes: