So I drive this beat up, ugly, ailing car. Hopefully, I’ll be getting a new one soon. In the meantime, though, I have to cope with this one.
For the last week or so, I’ve been getting static electricity shocks from the door frame whenever I get out of the car. There’s enough current for an arc to be visible. This happens every time, and I’m starting to wonder if my dear dud isn’t going to blow up on me.
Is this anything to be worried about? What are some possible causes for this? In the mid-term the solution to this problem will be to scrap the hunk 'o steel. In the meantime, any suggestions?
I don’t know if this is the same as the problem you are describing, but with my car I find that there is an interaction between certain fabrics (for example my gortex jacket) and the seat covers that, when the air is dry, generate quite a static charge when I slide my butt out the door. I usually get the zap on the back of my thigh as I stand up out of the car. It is sometimes strong enough to make my thigh muscles twitch. Althoug I almost never remember to do this, if I touch a metal part of the car as I slide out of the seat, I am effectively keeping myself grounded by bleeding off the charge before it can accumulate to the point where I get sparked.
So, try the experiment next time you exit the car. find a bare metal part of the car and hold it. Alternatively, you could try removing all of your clothes before getting out.
It’s possible these shocks aren’t being caused by static electricity at all. You might have a short circuit in the car’s electrical system that’s being transferred to the frame of the car.
Your car naturally tends to build up a charge as it moves down the road. How much charge will build up depends on a lot of things like the humidity in the air, for example. Depending on what your tires are made out of, a lot of this charge will simply dissipate through your tires. I’ve heard that newer tires tend to have much more of an insulating effect, which means that the car is much more likely to hold a charge until something makes contact between the metal of the car and the earth. In this case, that something is you.
One thing you can do is attach a piece of ground braid or something else conductive (I’ve heard of people using chains) to the underside of the car. You attach one end and let the other end drag on the ground, so obviously you need to find someplace to attach this where it can’t bounce around and get caught up in the moving parts under the car (like the drive shaft or wheels).
The other place where you tend to build up charge is when you scoot across the seat. Some materials build up a charge fairly easily. There are anti-static sprays you can coat your seats with that will help reduce this.
By the way, the one and only picture I’ve seen of someone supposedly starting a fire at a gas pump from a cell phone was rather obviously caused by a static discharge, not the cell phone. The guy had the cell phone in his right hand up to his ear, and touched the car with his left hand near the gas pump handle. The resulting FWOOOSH of flame (originating near his left hand) probably made him need to change his shorts afterwards, but didn’t look like it caused much permenant damage. However, the worst case is you blow up your car and kill lots of nearby people, so be careful to discharge yourself before you go anywhere near a gas pump.
As for the static discharge itself, it’s not causing you or your car any harm.
As pointed out, there can be a theoretical danger of fire if you have a highly charged auto body and bump the gas pump nozzle on the car body when you start filling up.
You can avoid this problem by hanging a rubber strip long enough to reach from the car frame to the earth.
This places the car at ground potential when you come to rest and ‘bleeds off’ the charge…
You can also develop the habit of approaching the vehicle with your key in hand and making the key the first thing that comes in contact.
That way you cn see the arc------and not suffer it.
This is so wrong it is funny. If you have a short circuit in the car’s electrical system you might:
[ul]
[li]blow fuses[/li][li]have the battery go dead[/li][li]burn the car to the ground[/li][/ul]
But you won’t induce a charge into the driver that will arc to ground when the door frame is touched.
Of course I have. The difference is the amperage. A static shock is 0.nuthing amps at a very high voltage. The arcing in a generator is anywhere from 35-200 amps at 12-maybe a 100 volts.
The most likely cause is dry air and the wrong combo of clothing material and seat material. Go buy some Static Guard and spray the seats. The problem will probably go away.
This is really funny, because the exact same thing has been happening to me for the last couple weeks. It only started once the weather started to get milder from the winter, so I thought that may have had something to do with it. However now the constant shocks are getting on my nerves (pun!) and I want a solution to this. To be more specific, as soon as I stop my car, open the door and then press down the lock (which is made of metal), the shock gets me. I haven’t actually bothered to look and see if I can see the arc, but the shock certaintly isn’t really painful, it’s just annoying now. It’s funny because now I try to get out of not locking my own car and asking a friend to press the lock for me
Another danger from static discharge exiting a car is getting too close to the radio antenna and zapping it. Many times this will results in the loss of a transistor in the early RF detection stage and the radio is toast.
With so many IC based electronics in cars today, I imagine there are a lot of other devices that could be similarly fried if a static discharge gets passed onto them, e.g., via an inadequately shielded switch.
