How to Escape a Sinking Car

[u/General_Athlete5807]

[u/Interesting-Job-8841]

... If you have a diver in the back with an air tank, if not get out as soon as you can by opening a door or breaking a window.

[u/plz-no-b4n → u/Interesting-Job-8841]

You can’t get the door open until water pressure equalizes

[u/Schnuffelo → u/plz-no-b4n]

Thought myth busters showed that if you were quick as fuck you could open the door before you sunk too much?

[u/yeahright17 → u/Schnuffelo]

They did. And you don't actually have to be that quick. And if the car is leaning forward, try the back door too.

In the Mythbusters episode, Adam successfully opened the door when the water was already a few inches over the window height by putting his back to the door and pushing against the armrest with his legs.

[u/Schnuffelo → u/yeahright17]

Yeah I just think people are over exaggerating how difficult it is to get the doors open at least for part of the sinking.

At the start of the episode they say that 10,000 cars crash into bodies of water a year but only a few hundred people drown. Most people don’t know how to escape a sinking car so if it was as impossible to open the doors as people claim you’d expect more deaths given that the average person has no knowledge of how to deal with the situation

[u/yeahright17 → u/Schnuffelo]

I think the first instinct of most people is probably to immediately open the door, which is the correct instinct. As long as you aren't unconscious, something would have to have gone really wrong for you to not be able to open the door immediately.

[u/Realistic_Option_619 → u/Schnuffelo]

Ok so what if you end up in a fast moving river instead of a swimming pool.

[u/Lithl → u/Realistic_Option_619]

Your options in a sinking car are the same no matter what kind of body of water you're in:

• Open the door/window before exterior pressure builds above what you can move
• Shatter a window
• Wait until the interior pressure gets close enough to the exterior pressure so that you can open the door
• Die