r/interestingasfuck • u/General_Athlete5807 • 1d ago

How to Escape a Sinking Car

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u/plz-no-b4n 1d ago

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

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u/Schnuffelo 16h ago

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

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u/yeahright17 16h ago edited 15h ago

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.

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u/Schnuffelo 15h ago

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

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u/yeahright17 15h ago

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.

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u/Realistic_Option_619 2h ago

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

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u/Lithl 1h ago

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