Interesting responses. I’d always heard the tires kept you from being grounded in lightning conditions. Didn’t know it wasn’t correct.
Absolutely cars can be locked so you cannot open the doors from the inside. They’re called child locks. And should the power fail totally on my Skoda Yeti, the only door that can be opened from the outside is the driver’s door. If you have the key.
I have an old beater VW Jetta with standard electric locks. The passenger side door sometimes won’t open even after unlocking the doors using either the key fob or the button on the driver’s door. The little tab moves up, and there is an audible click, but the door can’t be opened from inside or outside using the door handles.
It will eventually open if I keep locking and unlocking it but it sometimes takes so long it’s easier for a passenger to climb over to the driver’s seat and exit through that door.
The YouTube clip notwithstanding, I find this highly implausible. Lightning is the movement of electrons from a negatively charged source to a positively charged one. The negative charge is caused by friction, in this case the friction of the particles in the clouds moving past each other. Just as cloud-to-cloud lightning is caused by this, so to would the cloud-to-ground variety. Conceivably, many bolts may converge to strike a single source, if the source were positively charged enough, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s the movement of electrons from the clouds to the earth.
Are there any sources that corroborate the assertion that it goes the other way?
Well, I’ll be!
It did say the car was a “high security” one, so it might have had non-standard configuration. It’s still a stupid one.
Probably flying a kite while driving. They should have known better.
If your beater had broken locks that pretty much doesn’t count now, does it?
Also child locks are only on the rear doors as there are very few 3 year old drivers.
I’m not sure. It counts as a way that pulling the door handle inside the car doesn’t manually open the door, regardless of lock state. But neither the lock nor the handle nor the mechanical assembly are broken per se - it will all eventually work if I keep locking and unlocking the door.
Let me see if I have this right. The door is unlocked, you pull on the handle, the door doesn’t open, and you are telling me it isn’t broken?
You have a rather unique definition of normal operation.
It is intermittently broken. As could have been your customer’s, or whoever else mentioned they can’t open the door manually from the inside.
What aboot the car insurance policy? Will the company pay up, or are they off the hook due to an ‘act of god?’
Right, it’s broken. It might work sometimes but it is broken, not a very good example.
I guess I didn’t make myself clear about the issue with the lady I had on the phone, the problem was the lady on the phone.
There was NOTHING wrong with the car, she just thought she was locked in. All she had to do was try the handle and the door would open.
Just like this lady http://youtu.be/qrt2q6Mpeyc
We have a 1996 Subaru Legacy station wagon type thing.
I defy anyone to figure out what the locking sequenced on this particular car we have, not what it is supposed to be but what this one is doing.
Do this, sometime this happen or maybe that. Which door did you use? Did the back deck unlock?
Went for a drive and some of the doors auto locked but today the back hatch did not but the master locke-out switch was on so the only door or window controls should be the drivers but today … Brain esplodes…
Always carry 2 keys, have one on your person at all times. Also a window knock out device such as a hammer under the front seat.
Love that little thing, goes mostly anywhere that is called a road and some 4 wheeler trails that aren’t.
210,000 & going string.
I found this.
The previous poster covered this, but FYI the wiki on lightning is also pretty good. Lightning - Wikipedia
The scientific difference between upward & downward lighting is significant. The practical difference is negligible.
The CTV article (it was CTV coverage that went viral) notes that parts of the Chevy melted. I expect that linkages in the door opening mechanism might have melted and either broke or fused. I hypothesize that although there were both mechanical and electrical failures, it was the mechanical and not the electrical failures that prevented the doors from opening.
I suspect various plastic parts melted before any steel did.
Lighting strikes are strange. On this car it blew all the airbags. I personally saw a car that got hit by lighting and no bags deployed, the only visual damage were some pinholes and burnt paint on the roof. It did take out all the onboard electronics. I have seen pictures where the strike set fire to the interior. On one of my science feeds on Facebook the other day they had a video of a guy that got struck while standing next to his car. His arm didn’t work for a bit and he has some wild bruises on his arm.
Strange stuff lighting.
lightning can also cause damage by induction, i.e. nearby metal gets current in it not from the bolt itself.
a bolt also splits and goes many places.
once a high voltage high current charge is in something by whatever method it can go lots of places and not others. strange indeed.
The automatic seatbelt was a method to provide a “passive restraint” as an alternative if the carmaker was unable or unwilling to install airbags; for a time in the USA the requirement was to have either. But once airbags became more perfected, and mandatory across the board, the automatic seatbelts became redundant and went away.
I just asked a friend in the auto body repair business about lightning strikes on cars. He’s worked on 4 and the damage was always different. Two of the cars were parked and not running. One of them only had cosmetic damage, and the other one had a totally ruined electrical system as well as cosmetic damage. Of the 2 cars that were running, one of the drivers crashed into an embankment and the car was a total so he didn’t really diagnose the problems. The other car was also a total because the electronic system didn’t just fry, it fried everything it was connected to.
Lightning is weird stuff. As a biker I’m terrified of lightning. It wouldn’t have to hit me to kill me, just a close strike would be enough to fling me off my bike. I’m one of those people you see hiding under overpasses during electrical storms.