I expect there is a factual answer, but because its not easy to find it seems IMHO is the best place for this.
THis is about the story where a murderer kidnapps a woman and forces her to drive 33 hours, 2000 miles across country
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/police-man-wanted-oregon-deaths-arrested-wisconsin-78388292
THey obviously had to stop and get gas, or bathroom breaks, or food or even sleep. Why could she not take any of these opportunities to bail out and get help?
“I’m not going to kill you, as long as you do exactly what I say!”
Then plausibly he takes naps in the car while she drives, stops for pee breaks in the wilderness and tells her he’ll kill both her and anyone else at the pumps if she raises the alarm when they stop for gas. They can pick up water and snacks at the gas station too, but you can go 33 hours without food and water…
Maybe I’m a bad person, but the kidnapper killing others at the pumps if I try to escape is not my problem.
I don’t know if you are a bad person, but if you didn’t already know that it would be a problem for many other humans you are certainly an ignorant one.
Maybe she’s an Uber driver and was worried about her star rating.
One aspect is that people don’t always react rationally in a fearful situation. What you think you might do in a hypothetical conjured up in your desk chair could be very different from what you actually would do in a real-life situation. Some of that comes from the “flight or fight” and fear centers of the brain. These areas are at low-levels of the brain and can override rational and conscious thought, causing the person to act in irrational ways. For example, someone may think that they would punch an attacker if they jumped out suddenly in front of them, but what they might actually do is shriek and put their hands up to their face. That kind of fearful reaction comes from these low-level brain centers overriding your higher-level behavior. It may be extremely difficult or impossible to think straight in these highly stressful situations and people may act in strange ways.
There’s also the possibility she may have also had logical reasons to comply. Maybe he had her wallet with all her personal info and he said he would track her down if she escaped. Perhaps he told her he knew who her family was and that he would kill them if she tried to escape. Perhaps he said that his associates had her family held captive and would kill them if anything happened to him. There are lots of scenarios where she may have felt it was better to go along even if meant her own death in order to keep her loved ones safe. That’s something that happens with victims of trafficking. The traffickers say they will kill the victim’s family back home if they try to escape, so the victim stays a slave for years even though they could walk out the door and get help at anytime.
There’s also this detail in the mostly detail-free summary of events: “She was able to talk him into turning himself in.”
It’s not like she drove for 33 hours in terrified silence. She probably talked sympathetically (feigned or otherwise) to try to “bring him down from the ledge” to reduce the risk of him harming her or anyone else.
How valid is anybody’s opinion if they have never been in a similar situation?
I laughed.
I prefer the Larry Niven solution.
Once on the freeway, accelerate to as fast as the car will go. 120. whatever. Tell him you’re going to smash his side of the car into a bridge abutment.
He may have a gun, but you have the Deadlier Weapon.
It was her car, not his. I imagine her preference was also to get out of the situation alive.
The guy crashed his dad’s pickup truck less than 10 miles from my home and set it on fire, after having killed his father and 2 other people during his crime spree. A fourth individual is in the hospital in critical condition. The perpetrator was on foot and in hiding so far as the community knew. I spent less than peaceful nights on Friday and Saturday, till we learned he’d turned himself in.
I’m so glad the woman he kidnapped and forced to drive him to Wisconsin is all right. What a brave person who kept her wits about her! If she judged the best way to handle the situation was not to call attention to themselves, then I expect her judgment was correct. The perpetrator is one scary person who didn’t hesitate to kill others.
I look forward to hearing her story, when she’s ready to tell it.
They obviously had to stop and get gas, or bathroom breaks, or food or even sleep. Why could he not take any of these opportunities to stop kidnapping her??
I’m guessing he had her phone. Thus, he had virtually all of her personal info.
(Watch the movie Unhinged and you’ll see what happens when the bad guy gets your cell phone.)
See @filmore’s thoughtful post three above yours.
To add to that post: I’m a military veteran. I’ve served in war zones. I was never in combat, but I was in some situations that were pretty scary (to me, at least). I’ve known and talked to a lot of guys that did see combat. Training helps a lot, precisely because you don’t need to think “rationally”. In high stress situations, it’s very difficult, far more difficult than most people imagine, to act “rationally.” All sorts of people, including the last people you’d expect, will act in really weird ways under extreme stress.
As to your “Larry Niven solution”, I’m also struggling to see how you manage to only crash his side of the car into a bridge abutment. I mean, you can probably ensure he takes the brunt of the impact, but it’s not like a 120 mph collision is very survivable for anyone in the car. These kinds of “solutions” also require the other guy to make the same calculations that you are making, and for both of you to correctly gauge how the other one is making calculations.
Since the woman in question survived, apparently without significant injury, and her kidnapper eventually surrendered peacefully, I personally strongly prefer the Laura Johnson solution
Nobody knows how they will handle a situation like this until they experience it for themselves. We can armchair referee the victim’s decisions, as we love to do, but until it’s your brain drenched in adrenaline, your life and the lives of others on the line, you can only guess. I’m glad she did what she had to do to make it out alive.
To be clear, Larry Niven did not write about that solution. In his short story, the driver successfully convinced his carjacker that the car was actually stolen, and that the driver was going to commit suicide by car anyway because his fiancee has dumped him. He proved this by continuously swerving into oncoming traffic. The carjacker eventually begged to be let out.
In his afterword to the story, Niven said after the story was published, he met someone who had actually been carjacked and told the carjacker he’d crash the passenger side into a tree at 60 mph if the carjacker didn’t surrender immediately.
But there’s always this scene from Turner & Hooch.
So a fictional character successfully bluffs another fictional character. And the writer conveniently also scripts that continuously swerving into oncoming traffic doesn’t itself cause a fatal accident. And the fictional carjacker is scripted to be more afraid of dying than Our Hero. Having never read the story, it may well be well-written and compelling, but it doesn’t strike me as a realistic scenario to expect a real-life kidnapping victim to act out.
Well, Niven claims that he met someone who claimed that this happened. And it may have. Again, though, it’s very fortunate for that driver that the carjacker was “rational.” I’m not so sure a similar tactic would have worked quite as well on a carjacker who had just murdered his own father and ran down two elderly bystanders. Going out in a blaze of glory in a high speed car crash, and potentially maiming and killing other innocent drivers and passengers on the road, might have actually appealed to him.
Again, I think I personally prefer the Laura Johnson solution.
I’ve driven cars from the right seat after the driver was incapacitated. if I was a kidnapper bad guy riding right seat and the kidnappee tried to pull that high speed suicide shit from the driver’s seat I’d shoot them in the head, take the car to a stop, dump the body, and proceed on my way.
Easy peasy decision there. Assuming you’re already a kidnapper willing to kill your kidnappee.
I didn’t say “true love”, I said “to blave” which means “to bluff”.
I didn’t say I would crash it - I said I’d tell him I would. Going 120 down the freeway, he’d need to make up his mind fast. He throws his gun out the window, we don’t crash. His choice. I’d point out how the passenger side airbag is turned off. He can throw out the gun, or shoot me. There’s a bridge coming up fast. Better decide now.
So, you’re going to try to bluff the guy that just murdered his own father and ran down two elderly bystanders. Because he’s clearly not the kind of guy that wants to go down in a blaze of glory and take out innocent bystanders with him, and would totally find that intimidating. 
Or, as @LSLGuy suggests, maybe the carjacker decides to take his chances with shooting you and taking the wheel from the passenger seat.
Or you bluff him and he throws his pistol out the window. And then you pull over to let him out, and he takes out his other pistol and shoots you. Or he pulls out his knife and stabs you. Or he just grabs you and strangles you.
All of which, of course, assumes that you actually have the presence of mind in the moment to try this scheme. Which, again, the assumption that you would have the same presence of mind in an actual life-or-death situation as you do typing at your computer and thinking about fictional life-or-death scenarios is just deeply unrealistic.
And, again, the Laura Johnson solution resulted in her surviving unharmed and her kidnapper peacefully surrendering. So, why do you prefer the “Larry Niven” solution?