A friend was driving a 10yo mid-90s Toyota SUV on the freeway when lightning hit 50-ish feet ahead of him. The car electronics went sorta berserk. It still ran, but in the so-called “limp mode”. 2nd gear only, low engine RPM, etc. He limped it to the nearest dealership.
The diagnosis was multiple fried black boxes. Repairs were estimated much higher than the car was worth, so the insurance company totaled it out.
Zero cosmetic damage & lots of salvageable parts; some junkyard did well out of that one.
Strange and random stuff indeed. I always suspected he took a hit from a weak side branch of the main stroke.
Holy crap. I just did a google search on “teen trapped in car dies” and found multiple articles of a teenager being trapped in a car that they could not open and dying from heat stroke.
Sorry for the thread derailing, but how is this possible in this day and age? Cars should always be easily open-able from the inside. So we have the case from 2008, and another in 2013. Crazy. Unacceptable.
Even if it is true, (which it might sort of be), it doesn’t make much difference.
Exagerate by imagining the car as a very long wire, from almost the ground to almost the clouds. Even if the wire is isolated at both ends, it still shorts out most of the path from the ground to the sky.
The car body is conductive. That means that the voltage at the top of the car is about the same as the voltage at the bottom of the car body. That means that the car counts as a high point even if the tyres are completely isolating.
Right, the voltage in lightning is high enough that the minor gap of the ground clearance counts for little.
Heck, we now require a manual inside-open capability for the trunk. That bit about making it so that the security system overrides all means of opening the door is just daft. (But OTOH, who the heck leaves with the keys, leaving someone in the car with all the powered windows closed, anyway?)