Yes! I did a fire training course back in the old days when it involved a real fire extinguisher rather than just PowerPoint and it was interesting how many of us failed to put out a small fire in a cardboard box. You really do have to get close enough to aim at the base of the fire if you hope to achieve anything.
Also, if you fail to extinguish a fire with the first fire extinguisher, it's usually game over. It'll be much worse by the time you get back with another one.
Also a lot of people dramatically overestimate the abilities of a fire extinguisher.
A regular extinguisher will put out a bit of burning paper or your cats tail on fire, but when a set of curtains is on fire you should probably just evacuate.
The best thing is that a fire estinguisher costs like 10€, one of the small ones. You can just go light a fire where it's allowed and put it out. And maybe do it multiple times for every family member.
Still cheaper than going to the movies and more fun for the kids =)
The local fire department did training at a previous place I worked where we each put out a fire with a refillable fire extengishable that squirted water instead of chemicals. I'm sure it wasn't a perfect simulation, but that strikes me as a reasonable middle ground for training non-firefighters.
Your local boy scouts almost certainly have a working relationship with their local fire department that results in the FD taking them to wherever they train once every couple years and going through all those motions and more.
A 5lb dry extinguisher in the right hands can put out one of those oval stock tanks full of burning diesel, twice.
We had (optional) safety training when I worked at Square, which included CPR training, going over office evacuation procedures, etc. One of the most fun parts was they had a virtual fire extinguisher training, which involved basically a video game fire extinguisher controller to put out a fire on a tv. It’s definitely not as exciting as using a real fire extinguisher training, but can also be done in an office meeting room.
"ALSO EVERY AIRPORT SHOULD HAVE MOCK EMERGENCY AIRPLANE DOORS FOR PEOPLE TO TRY OUT."
I would pay money for this in the safety amusement park, but in real life way more people would get hurt operating the fake one at the airport than we'd help in real emergencies. Plane crashes where the emergency exit gets operated are so rare they effectively don't happen.
I had the opportunity to deploy (and use!) a slide at a Lufthansa event, super cool experience but given that just the slide deployment probably cost them over $30k I can’t really see it being a common thing.
Of course just opening an exit door replica you could do for ~free
I think mock slide deployment could be made much cheaper than 30k - e. g. high-volume compressors can be used instead of gas canisters, the materials can be cheaper because there is no weight or temperature requirements, etc.
I think the mock exit door would only be interesting with the corresponding emergency slide. The only problem is that in almost all cases where the emergency slide has been deployed and used, at least some passengers have been injured beyond a minor scrape - think severe sprains and tears, a broken bone, etc.
The purpose of the slide is to 1) empty the plane _very_ quickly 2) without causing a life threatening injury. Most people are not going to be injured using it, but some will and it's not really worth the small chance your leg gets fucked up forever from being ejected the wrong way.
Ah, you have intrusive thoughts as well. I mention it only to say that someone at my local grocery does not, based on the fact they thought to type up, print and post a sign saying PLEASE DO NOT POKE THE WATERMELONS thinking that would lead to a decrease in watermelon finger strikes.
Sounds like they're having issues with people thinking you can poke, prod, or drum on watermelons to check "ripeness" but it got lost in translation to "non-confromtstional."
Maybe? I am well aware/ don't care about watermelon ripeness because I find watermelon to be a complete waste of time 90% of the time. But now I want to poke them.
Safety mechanisms are often inherently unsafe, because they are safer than the alternative, so you don't want people playing with them.
e.g. You cat cut yourself on the glass of a fire alarm, or break an ankle on an emergency exit slide.
Safety mechanisms are not inherently unsafe. A very small minority that leverage fast-deploying mechanics are, however the majority of safety is neutral. Life vests, eye protection, fall harness, emergency brake, electrical gloves, etc don't actively harm the person.
> I've never broke / pulled a fire alarm, I'm sure I can, but let me.
Man. I did as a kid in school.
I did some stupid "I am not touching it" games on the glass front and that button sucked itself in like I was opening a hatch on ISS. "Push hard" my ass.
Firefighters popped up, I was so embarrassed to apologize to teachers, firefighters, school principal and even colleagues who complained for some reason about the unscheduled break. It wasn't even cold outside then!
My dad knew the right people and somehow bailed me out, but I still feel awkward passing by their main station where I also had to show up to explain myself. That was effing 35y ago, roughly!
I mean, I am mostly over it. But I wouldn't call it a win :)
This is an obvious and simple idea and definitely should be driven by the FAA. Also, make sure the door goes somewhere cold like a freezer. Too many passengers dress for their destination airport and not their destination climate.
No, this is backwards. Fun is trying new things (I think it's evolutionary mechanism that ensure kids are learning by default), and once the thing has been tried, it's not new anymore, so won't be tried again. Best thing we can actually do is to channel that, as OP proposed.
If only we had cheap, multi-use inflatable exit ramps that deflate, fold and stow themselves after use. Which is not a thing, apparently.
This is how so many fires start. Kids are stupid (it's biological, brain hasn't developed, they can't help it). Fire is exciting. Then they go experiment with fire in a place you really shouldnt -> whoops, something burns down because they don't know how aggressive a fire is in real life and how hard it is to put out.
But if you give them the boyscout/camping treatment of having them light a fire so many times it becomes boring, let them play with matches, move burning logs with thick gloves and practice putting out controlled campfires safely it becomes boring, normal, and the excitement goes away.
>and once the thing has been tried, it's not new anymore, so won't be tried again
There must be something in the water here, because kids here do it over and over again, usually ending up they getting hurt/nearly hurt or told to stop.
Well, the way my parents discouraged me from smoking was, they brought a pack of cigarettes home and let me have one. Was awful, never wanted to try it again. That was an important life lesson for me.
You can't open the emergency doors while the cabin pressure is higher than outside pressure, if that's what you're worried about. And I think they don't let kids sit at the emergency exit either, because the person sitting there needs to be physically capable to remove the door, which has some weight to it.
The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate. Manufacturers can stick with tempered glass if they beef up the side curtain airbags enough to prevent ejection, which is exactly what happens on a lot of base models and rear windows to keep BOM costs down. The list of brands using laminated glass is accurate, but it applies mostly to their premium trims or front rows only.
There is also the issue of fleet turnover. With the average age of US vehicles pushing 13 years, the install base is still overwhelmingly tempered glass. Writing off the tool entirely because new luxury cars have moved on ignores the reality of what people are actually driving. You are statistically much more likely to be trapped in a 2012 Civic than a 2025 S-Class.
The smartest thing to do would be to check your car’s windows for any indication (the AAA report, page 19, cited in the article has examples) of whether they’re laminated or tempered. AFAICT, whether my new-ish Subaru Ascent’s windows are laminated depends on location (front or rear) and installation differs between the Ascent trims. Best to check for your specific car and where you’re likeliest to be sitting.
If you can afford an 2025 S-class you can afford to fly for medium distance travel, you probably aren't slogging out a long commute because you live in one of those rich inner suburbs. You leave the house at reasonable hours and get home at reasonable hours, etc, etc.
There's all sorts of stuff that's just a proxy for generalized correlation with wealth and wealthy lifestyles.
> The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate.
Nope. The article states the following just after the table:
> It's true that not all automakers have switched over to laminated glass for the side windows; the FMVSS 226 law stipulates that you can get around it if you install elaborate side airbags that also prevent ejection.
As the grandparent points out, although the article says that, the actual regulation does not. The regulation says you have to prevent side ejections, it doesn’t say how. You can read it yourself:
> Ejection mitigation countermeasure means a device or devices, except seat belts, integrated into the vehicle that reduce the likelihood of occupant ejection through a side window opening, and that requires no action by the occupant for activation.
Lamination and side airbags seem to be the way it’s usually done today, but nothing prevents a better way.
Disclosure: I work for a car company, not on this.
If you want to be prepared for automotive incidents:
1. Check your mood and intoxication level before and while driving. Mood is more important than everything besides drugs and alcohol.
2. Left turns (or across traffic as applicable) are dangerous. Take extra care while turning left (or across traffic).
3. Using screens at night is bad for everyone, but especially above the age of 40, both focus and iris (light balance) response take longer. Using a screen changes your focus and blows out your night vision.
4. If your car has pushbutton electronic door openers, PRACTICE opening the door without battery power.
The good news is that at least as it pertains to getting rid of physical controls, automakers have largely learned their lesson and are trying to go back as fast as reasonably possible (while also trying to balance recouping the tooling costs from fewer buttons). VW was heavily heavily criticized and is bringing it all back.
I’m confident that if consumer sentiment starts to skew one way regarding electronic door handles, we will also see a reversal. What is unfortunate now is that other automakers are following the lead that Tesla set. Tesla essentially proved one type of electronic door and it is engineered in such a way to be cheap and reliable enough. I’m confident that if engineers are given the space to really innovate and explore ideas, they can find something that is both better mechanically while remaining highly aerodynamic.
> VW was heavily heavily criticized and is bringing it all back.
ID.BUZZ with physical controls would be my dream car, no joke.
Currently the main issues for me are the shitty touch buttons and underpowered heater (it's the same as in the ID.4, which has like 30% of the interior volume of the BUZZ...)
I have no idea, don’t own a Tesla and haven’t been in one that often.
Looks like some models might have the manual door release switch easily accessible in the front but not in the back, about what you’d expect from Tesla.
At least the fact that they have a decent solution shows that there’s no reason this has to be a problem for electric doors.
It's not a bad feature. My fancy car has them, and it can watch for traffic and stop/slow you opening the door if there's a car coming up that maybe you didn't see (or look for).
And on mine, the same handle that you push to open with electricity will also open manually if you pull it twice. Which is handy, because the 12v battery failed in the first year. Feels like 12v batteries are a lot less reliable lately.
Getting in from the outside with the manual handle isn't so obvious, it's kind of hidden at the back of the handle.
>3. Using screens at night is bad for everyone, but especially above the age of 40, both focus and iris (light balance) response take longer. Using a screen changes your focus and blows out your night vision.
On that note, if anyone with Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, et al. would like to revisit the way their apps handle ride assignment - specifically, the way platforms generally refuse to assign orders when the car is stationary, but then inundate contractors with notifications that must be responded to immediately when the car is in motion - it'd be much appreciated.
One of my pet peeves about screen UIs is that they're worse than they need to be for night use. Modern dark themes are blue-heavy, which negatively impacts both pupil response and bleaching more than colors of the same luminance with more green and red.
There should be two dark modes: a simple dark mode, like most dark themes today, to work in dimmed lighting, and an actual night mode, designed to be legible but not mess with adaptation in total darkness. I don't know the research on this (and I'm sure military and aviation have lots of data here), but intuitively it should use mostly thin red and green lines.
Some cars (Honda Civic) had this feature where you could change the theme of the UI and it had 3-4 presets (blue, red, amber, green IIRC). That was before those screens were just a built-in Android tablet and sadly it didn't carry over.
But you're right and it's the reason most german cars had red illuminated gauge clusters until a few years ago.
Funnily enough the first comment in the article is "oh yeah, if you're in Tesla good fucking luck, their doors fail and the releases are incredibly hard to find in emergency"
> Use caution when using the manual door release; the window will not automatically lower when the door is opened and damage to the window or vehicle trim may occur.
Manually opening the rear doors is a destructive operation!
Is it actually "destructive" or is it more of a "cramming the door seal over the window and flexing the widow assembly in a way that would result in more failure under warranty than they want if done regularly" type thing.
I think that's exactly what they recently got sued for. Car caught fire, electrical stopped working (and therefore the doors stopped working) and a teen burned inside
It's wild how my car won't let me change basic settings while vehicle is in drive (too much menu nav as to be distraction & I've had cars that would only let me edit the navigation destination while in park) yet - this exists as well
You're forgetting the "people who don't care, they just want to be seen looking like they care so they make a bunch of noise" factor.
Once you multiply the safety problem by the this factor it all makes sense.
A small non-problem that every screeching jerk will be exposed to is a bigger actual problem more likely to get addressed than a potential real problem that will mostly go unnoticed.
Also rear doors are kinda optional. They still make 2door 2-row cars. Heck, they made 2-door 2-row SUVs pretty recently. And child safety locks are a thing. So there is an argument to be made there (not that I think it holds up on modern stuff).
The front ones vary and certain models are atrociously designed. If you get in an accident and have a concussion, and adrenaline, add a 10x difficulty factor
This is almost certainly what killed those kids in piedmont
I didn't find them hard to find (in the front seat). When I first got my car it kept complaining because I instinctively reached for that lever instead of the button. The computer claimed I could break the window if I kept using the manual lever, and I had to figure out where the button was.
Not saying the car is great, just that I found the door lever easily. I'd still rather have real controls (and a real sensor) for the wipers and the reliance on software and software updates makes me very nervous. You can't even open the glove box without a voice command or touch screen (as far as I can tell).
A better design would be for the 'button' to be a normal lever in the normal location, and the emergency manual release to be triggered by pulling that lever extra hard.
There is no wrong way to open the door. Any suffering on the owner's part is caused by the manufacturer building the car that way. A car like that clearly isn't meant to carry untrained passengers. If the car owner insists on buying an unsuitable car, then that's on the owner. It's no different from buying a two seat sports car as a family of four.
Regarding screens: also make sure to configure the brightness correctly! I was recently driving with a relative in their new car at night, and the screen for navigation etc. was bright enough that I could see noticeably less than I'm used to. Turns out the screen does have separate brightness settings for day & night, but the night setting was at 4/10 per default (compared to 6/10 for the day setting). After lowering it to 1/10 the screen is still easily readable, and suddenly it's easy to see dark stuff again!
Any mood intense enough is extremely distracting and dangerous for driving, whether anger, infatuation, mourning, etc.
Because of this some countries have psychological testing to check your emotional stability when you get your license renewed, but realistically your emotions will be compromised for short durations much more often than that.
The test is a long term ( 15-30 minutes ) strict focus test. You don't have time to fully check everything you do on it, so you do your best and the psychologist verifies both that you have a sufficient ability to focus as a % of tasks reasonably responded to, and that you don't have large "emotional gaps" in your responses where your mind wandered to your bonnie for 45 seconds and you didn't interact with the tasks much or at all.
None of these glass breakers are any good at what they're supposed to do anyways, I'd wager all of their websites delinate that they are for tempered glass only. What you want is porcelain or ceramic.
Unfortunately, afaik, porclean/cermaic glass breakers are illegal in most states. They are "Burglary Tools".
Nothing wrong with keeping a box of spark plugs in your center console though
A ceramic glass breaker isn't going to be any better than the metal tools on laminated glass, breaking the glass is only half the battle, you've still got to get through the intact glass pane held in place by the plastic laminate.
>Nothing wrong with keeping a box of spark plugs in your center console though
But then you've got to keep a tool to break the spark plug to give you a sharp ceramic shard to get through the glass.
That old spark plug thing was from when cars had tempered side windows, wasn't it? I don't see how those would be particularly effective at dealing with lamination.
I fail to see how any of your suggestions are going to do any better on laminated glass. Breaking the glass isn’t the problem here, it’s the lamination.
I bought a fire extinguisher recently but I’ve never used one. I have a faint idea of how it works and what kind of result I’d get based on what I’ve seen on TV. But if a serious fire ever breaks out I don’t even know if I’d even remember to grab and use it.
In a "serious" fire you should ignore the fire extinguisher get everyone out of the building.
Fire extinguishers are for small fires! If a little oil in your frying pan catches on fire and you don't have a lid readily available to smother it, use a fire extinguisher. But if your smoke alarm wakes you up and you discover your whole kitchen on fire, get out. The fire extinguisher will not help in that situation, and it may cause you to waste time. (Tip: If and only if the fire extinguisher is easily available, carry it with you as you exit. You might need it to use it clear a path to get out.)
A fire extinguisher is to clear a safe path to the exit if the fire blocks it. never put them by the exit door as I see so many people do (in their garrage)
they can also be used on small fires but only if there is a safe escape route. (This is probably the most common use but not the primary use)
99% of the benefit of putting the extinguisher by the exit door is that it helps draw panicking people to the exit door. Which gives them another saving throw against Heroic Idiocy, at +4 - "Should I grab this totally unfamiliar little fire extinguisher and carry it back toward the big scary fire, to do something I've never even tried doing? Or should I just run out the handy exit door that I'm right next to?"
That's right, the best is to have a watered dishcloth that will suffocate the fire, hence stopping it. The fire extinguisher may be a bad idea because the pressure will spread burning oil around across the kitchen and the water is definitively the worse idea because it will counterintuitively make a bigger flame and also spread burning oil.
That works, but be sure to use a wool or cotton cloth.
——-
The proper method to deal with an oil fire: turn off the heat and smother the fire with a metal lid, metal baking sheet, or wool/cotton cloth. Do not use a fire blanket made of polyester or nylon; it will melt and burn producing toxic smoke. Do not use flour or any other flammable/explosive powder. Do not use water, as the liquid water will get into the oil and expand 1600 times its original size as it turns to steam; this rapid expansion will fling burning oil everywhere. If you do use an extinguisher, be careful not to spread the burning oil.
For small NON-OIL, non-electrical fires, smothering with a wet non-synthetic cloth is the best way to stop the fire.
If you have an old one that you want to get rid of, it's a good idea to set up a controlled fire and try out your extinguisher on it. That way you can get some experience.
Really though, it mostly is just pull pin -> aim low (at the base and source of the fire) -> squeeze until extinguished. Sweep the nozzle from side to side to get proper coverage.
They're intended to be used by anyone with no training, so there's not much to go wrong (assuming you haven't bought the wrong type and use it on an oil fire, although most of the ones I see for sale for consumers are the powder kind, which work on anything. The water ones are the worst, and I've never seen one).
As someone who has found themselves in a situation out in the wild with a fire and a fire extinguisher (neither of which were mine), with no direct extinguisher experience, you can take some solace in that they work very easily. They're not some wild hose that going to send you around the room. There's very little force. And you can simply fire it in bursts. It takes no time to get a feel for it and use it with precision.
If you find yourself with a fire and an extinguisher, do not hesitate to pull the pin, and go to it. You'll figure it out. In the end, you can't really make the situation worse.
If you're in the U.S., you might check if your local fire department has a CERT[0] training course. (I did it many years ago in San Francisco; they call it NERT for some reason.)
It'll give you a chance to practice putting out an actual fire, refresh first aid skills, learn the incident command system, learn basic search and rescue, and other preparedness skills to help yourself, your family, and neighbors in an emergency (in that order).
If you are looking to practice, the MythBusters said a fire extinguisher was an excellent way to quickly cool a case of beer. So, you can make it a $30 party trick and a teaching moment.
Water extinguishers are almost completely useless.
I once had a go at putting out a fire in a waste paper bin with a water extinguisher, as part of a fire safety course. The burning paper just floated on the water as the bin filled up.
CO2 extinguishers are more effective. But I believe you have to be careful where you hold it or your skin may freeze onto it.
The time you want water is when something that water can soak into is on fire. Sofas, curtains, bedding, bookshelves, carpets, filing cabinets full of paper, etc.
The water soaks in and prevents the fire re-igniting. 30 years ago, workplaces contained a lot more filing cabinets and bookshelves, and smoking was more common.
CO2 is non-conductive, and less messy. It's also great at flowing around things, making it good for spraying through vents into electrical cabinets and car engines. Downside is the CO2 dissipates within a few seconds, so if the material is prone to re-igniting it's not such a good choice.
Dry powder is in between - the powder stays around, but doesn't soak in. It's a good choice if you're only going to get one extinguisher.
Water extinguishers are incredibly useful for putting out small incidental fires that can result from hot work without making a big mess. The kind of stuff you'd just move outside or let burn out rather than discharge a powder extinguisher over.
Nobody is whipping out a dry-chem extinguisher because the leaves under the workbench caught on fire from welding sparks.
A couple years ago somebody parked a stolen car in front of our building, stuffed a rag in the fuel filler, and lit it. I must have pulled up just a couple minutes after they had left. Grabbed the fire extinguisher I kept under the seat and put it out. I had that extinguisher around for about 5 years. You never know when you'll need it.
My son picked up and used one effectively having about the same level of experience you do (none, but he knew the basic idea and had read the label). Can’t remember if he was 7 or 8 at the time, but either way I’m pretty sure you’ll be ok.
I mean, still doesn’t hurt to get more familiar, but…
I've used one (in training). Works great, nice clean cuts, but still a little slow. Quicker to just use an axe which, if you're a firefighter, you have handy. (Carefully chop around the perimeter of the windshield or side window. Use gentle blows to minimize dispersion of broken glass within the cabin.)
Similar experience with a 2010 Honda Odyssey, drove it for 10 years and never saw a crack even though I'm sure it took a beating.
Then we got a 2022 Passport and I swear every single trip has a new crack or chip. I was surprisingly fortunate to be talked into the windshield warranty as the sales guy has been through this exact thing and replacing these windshields with assistive tech is expensive. That warranty has already paid for itself and more including once full windshield replacement.
Huh, odd. I have a car with assistive controls and they also tried to talk me into this warranty but I declined. They mentioned replacement would require extra money.
I did end up getting a windshield replacement shortly after purchase (like 6 months into ownership a rock came out of a truck and hit my windshield). I got it replaced for the normal $100-$200 not from the dealership and the vision system has had no issues.
Laminated glass does not prevent routine stone chip events – if a tiny fragment of the stone becomes wedged in the outer ply or at the laminate interface at a tension point and, coupled with the temperature difference (inside the cabin vs ambient), cabin pressure and body flex that often place higher tensile stress lower on the windscreen, the crack can start propagating very quickly.
That was my experience earlier in the year: I was driving alongside a large fuel tanker on a city road when a tiny stone chip, probably thrown up from under the tanker’s tyres, struck the front windscreen. It took about an 1 ½ hour for the initially invisible crack to spread into an irreparable 30 cm one – effectively right in front of my eyes – and the windscreen had to be replaced. Lesson learned: do not drive anywhere near large trucks or fuel tankers or maintain a larger distance.
But the laminated glass will prevent the structural collapse of the windshield and will also prevent the occupants from being showered with glass shards. It is also more likely that the windshield will withstand an impact from a large stone, leaving a localised and static crack that can be repaired with resin.
> ...and will also prevent the occupants from being showered with glass shards.
Hasn't it been the case for a long time now that glass in automobiles is coated so that it breaks into small, generally-square fragments, rather than shards?
I've never smashed a window myself, but every couple of months, I see the remains of a window smashing on the sidewalk... it's always a pile of small, generally-square fragments.
My memory tells me that this design was mandated long ago because folks would get shards embedded in them effectively forever. One of my parents related a story that one of the parents up the tree would irregularly have to extract migrating glass shards breaking through the skin of his face that had been embedded during an automobile accident many years prior. But, perhaps that story is bullshit and completely fabricated, IDK.
That's tempered glass which breaks into the safer fragments. Still not completely safe obviously, especially if stuff is getting thrown around violently in an accident. The bigger safety case for laminated glass though is since it sticks together your body or limbs can't fly out through it in a rollover accident (even if belted can happen on the sides). There's also some fringe benefits: noise isolation, UV protection, and supposedly more annoying for thieves.
The table from the report shows that the tools do crack the window but don't break it. Which is probably the main difference between old glass and the newer layered glass? If you crack an outer layer it is no longer usable, but you can't escape through it.
Usually the glass companies force you to pay it. For “safety”. It’s just a “you have a nice car so we’re gonna charge you more” fee.
I’ll probably be doing my own windshield on my Tesla to avoid this. Safelight has decent prices but whacks you with a huge fee for pressing “calibrate” in the service menu, which is user accessible.
Hold up you can calibrate it yourself? I was under the impression you need additional hardware jigs to align cameras to fixed points, similar to a steering alignment.
Not sure about the "car falls into the lake" scenario, but I know some women who carry these for fear of a crazed Uber driver who might lock them in the car.
You can just unlock the door and exit the car in that case-- there's no way to "lock someone in" unless you've modified the lock somehow. And if someone did that, they probably reinforced the glass too.
Well, I learned something new today! I always thought that kind of thing would be illegal because it's a fire hazard -- if the driver was unconscious after an accident, the passengers could be trapped in a burning car.
You are assuming a crazed uber driver is smart and knowledgeable enough to do that, but 90% of people driving ubers to start with are doing so because they don't have those kind of skills or knowledge.
For anyone looking for an in-vehicle EDC to solve this problem I'd recommend a Keetch tool. I used them in the fire service with great success on the laminated glass of a windscreen. I assume it'd work equally well on a laminated side window glass - though I've not tried. Nice thing is that the sharp spike on it would work quite well on tempered glass too (though we had proper glass breakers for that).
Seems like they did it the by-the-book way for the commercial, rather than the panicked-escape real-world way... i.e. I'd do one vertical cut in the middle, then I'd be frantically pulling the glass shards out by hand (or claw hammer if available).
It's a shame AAA's testing wasn't more extensive. They should have determined the best tool for a quick exit... Crowbar, wood saw, large serrated knife, or can opener for example.
Multitools with glass breakers seem likely to be more durable and not fall apart like the cheap plastic hammers. e.g. Leatherman SIGNAL and $35 clones like B0BRRXVW9T. They also have knife blades, saw blades, pliers, and can openers for a good selection of alternative options to test out.
I think it's fine for the "sinking in a lake" case too? The water pressure prevents the door from opening, and my understanding was you want the car to fill with water fast enough you can take a breath, let the pressure equalize, then open the door. You're likely not going to get out through a broken window while the water is pouring in through it (I guess if you're fast enough to still be above the water line), so by the time that stops it doesn't seem like there'd be much difference between opening the door and maneuvering through the much smaller window.
Firefighters and other emergency service personnel can get through laminated glass, but it takes much more time and effort, as well as tools you're not likely to have in your car.
This is apparently a mix of myth and misleading information: They can't be used to directly break the glass like these devices were designed to, they were never designed for this purpose as people claim, and even the "lever it between the glass and door" method only works with tempered glass and not the laminated glass that's used in newer cars.
I think there's an impossibly thin line between making glass that's easy to break through on purpose, but hard for a high speed head to break through in an accident.
I'm fairly sure that the two lines are way past each other, on the wrong side. The force with which you'll be flung against the glass is much higher than what you can punch.
It's worse than impossibly thin. It's a massive gray area of acceptable solutions where no matter where in the area you choose some bike shedding jerk will be able to construe it as though you chose wrong.
This law is intended to protect belted occupants as well. The target here is rollover crashes where belted occupants may still be jostled partially free from the belt and be partially ejected.
> Safety designs that kill people are indefensible.
Then it logically follows that either the only defensible approach is to not have any safety solutions, or that there simply isn’t a defensible approach.
The tradeoffs are unavoidable, a seatbelt or airbag might very well kill someone despite saving countless lives. Even tech like lane departure warnings will almost inevitably distract and kill someone.
I'm going to guess that you don't work on safety engineering. All safety designs have tradeoffs. Airbags can kill you but we still use them because the probable benefits outweigh the risks.
Airbags do not kill people. There were fewer than 300 airbag-related deaths of the course of two decades, and the vast majority of those deaths were caused by not wearing a seatbelt.
Frontal airbags, generally speaking, make people who would've died survive and make people who would've walked away with nothing look like they went a few rounds with a professional boxer. It's a flattening effect.
This is literally the logic anti-seatbelt folks use. “I don’t wear a seatbelt because if I’m in a crash, the seatbelt could end up trapping me in a fire.”
Safety design very often involves trade offs. The chances you get partially ejected and killed during a rollover are meaningfully higher than the chances you die because you can’t break the glass to get out. Do you even keep a glass breaker in your car or do you imagine after surviving a wreck that’s trapped you inside your car that you will have the strength to just punch through a glass window?
The problem isn't that doors don't unlock, it's that you can't open the door against the massive water pressure, or against the door crumpling in itself and ruining the mechanism.
Every Day Carry. Nerds on reddit pump each other up to carry a bunch of nominally practical stuff around every day like pocket knives and glass breaking tools and seat belt cutters and such.
EDC is when you carry 3 different sized pocket knives, a flashlight, a watch, a weird high tech pen, a card holder, a gun – and everything is color matched and presented nicely in a photograph you post on reddit.
> "The fantasy being peddled by the toolmakers is: You will crash, remain conscious, find that your car has burst into flame or is slowly sinking in water, find that you cannot undo your seatbelt, yet are still able to reach for this specialty tool, slice through your seatbelt, then smash the window open and climb free to safety."
Uh huh... Now consider this scenario; you lose control and crash into a tree. You are out and your car catches fire. Who gets to the scene first? Firefighters, or probably just whichever randos happened to be right there when it happened? Probably the later. Probably for the best if one of them is able to break your window and pull you out.
As others mentioned, it is an achievement from Half Life episode 2. Player has to carry a garden gnome to the end of the game. Which is not too bad, minus the extensive driving sections (sometimes under fire) where the gnome is bouncing around the vehicle.
It is a fun feather in your cap, but definitely not suitable for a first run through of the game.
The problem isnot cracking the glass. The problem is breaking it apart enough to get through. Your reference joke is not quite appropriate to this context.
The fact that you're trying to optimize for "police serving speeding tickets to insane sovcits" over "getting flung out of the car in an accident and being crushed by the car" makes me glad you don't design cars.
Why should they exit a car over a speeding ticket? A speeding ticket is not a jail sentence and does not warrant an arrest. In fact unless a driver is actively trying to harm somebody or has an active arrest warrant there is no reason whatsoever for them to leave their car or allow cops to remove people from cars.
In some states, it is the law that officers can order you to step out of the vehicle during any valid traffic stop, regardless if it is criminal or civil.
In some states it is the law that if you are from out of state and get a speeding ticket, you either have to pay the officer in cash while you are stopped or they can take you to jail until money is posted or it is your court date.
This happened to a friend of mine from Wisconsin, visiting me in Michigan about ten years ago. I was shocked to learn this was actual Mochigan law, and could hardly believe it even after verifying it. He felt very “lucky” to have had several hundred dollars in cash to simply hand over to the officer. Michigan only just rescinded those laws in 2019: https://landline.media/michigan-laws-end-roadside-cash-payme...
It's actually great. Their tickets are (or were) cheap and not reported to insurance if paid on the spot.
Far superior to the "pretend it's more than 1% about safety and peddle it to the worst kind of people" approach that most other states take with speeding enforcement IMO.
In the sovereign citizen cases they are talking about, the typical case is that the vehicle is not registered/doesn't have plates and the driver refuses to identify themselves. They only barely lower the window if at all. They usually go back and forth a few times until the police tell them they are under arrest for multiple reasons relating to driving without a license and failure to identify.
The glass breaking happens after multiple offices have arrived for backup as the person usually gets dragged from the car screaming. The videos are extremely entertaining to watch.
The combination of unregistered vehicle, failure to prove the driver has a license, and the drivers insisting they should be allowed to drive away is absolutely a combination where arrest is legal.
You don't necessarily have to if you're just getting a speeding ticket. But in order to write a speeding ticket, you have to hand over a valid Driver's License so they know who to ticket. Exactly what should they do if the driver refuses to provide their Driver's License?
Man there needs to be some sort of amusement park where you try out common emergency safety mechanisms.
I've never broke / pulled a fire alarm, I'm sure I can, but let me.
ALSO EVERY AIRPORT SHOULD HAVE MOCK EMERGENCY AIRPLANE DOORS FOR PEOPLE TO TRY OUT.
Yes! I did a fire training course back in the old days when it involved a real fire extinguisher rather than just PowerPoint and it was interesting how many of us failed to put out a small fire in a cardboard box. You really do have to get close enough to aim at the base of the fire if you hope to achieve anything.
Also, if you fail to extinguish a fire with the first fire extinguisher, it's usually game over. It'll be much worse by the time you get back with another one.
Also a lot of people dramatically overestimate the abilities of a fire extinguisher.
A regular extinguisher will put out a bit of burning paper or your cats tail on fire, but when a set of curtains is on fire you should probably just evacuate.
The best thing is that a fire estinguisher costs like 10€, one of the small ones. You can just go light a fire where it's allowed and put it out. And maybe do it multiple times for every family member.
Still cheaper than going to the movies and more fun for the kids =)
The local fire department did training at a previous place I worked where we each put out a fire with a refillable fire extengishable that squirted water instead of chemicals. I'm sure it wasn't a perfect simulation, but that strikes me as a reasonable middle ground for training non-firefighters.
That is a great idea. Lots of people learn CPR. Perhaps there is a market for a school that teaches basic, hands-on safety skills.
-How to put out a cooker fire with a fire blanket.
-How to use a fire extinguisher.
-How to cut a seat belt.
-How to break a window.
etc
Could be quite a fun day out. I would definitely pay for something like that for me and my family.
Your local boy scouts almost certainly have a working relationship with their local fire department that results in the FD taking them to wherever they train once every couple years and going through all those motions and more.
A 5lb dry extinguisher in the right hands can put out one of those oval stock tanks full of burning diesel, twice.
We had (optional) safety training when I worked at Square, which included CPR training, going over office evacuation procedures, etc. One of the most fun parts was they had a virtual fire extinguisher training, which involved basically a video game fire extinguisher controller to put out a fire on a tv. It’s definitely not as exciting as using a real fire extinguisher training, but can also be done in an office meeting room.
I’m still upset they didn’t let us start fires in the meeting rooms to practice using real extinguishers.
Miss working with you!
Virtual training is better than nothing. But I don't think it really compares doing IRL.
"ALSO EVERY AIRPORT SHOULD HAVE MOCK EMERGENCY AIRPLANE DOORS FOR PEOPLE TO TRY OUT."
I would pay money for this in the safety amusement park, but in real life way more people would get hurt operating the fake one at the airport than we'd help in real emergencies. Plane crashes where the emergency exit gets operated are so rare they effectively don't happen.
I had the opportunity to deploy (and use!) a slide at a Lufthansa event, super cool experience but given that just the slide deployment probably cost them over $30k I can’t really see it being a common thing.
Of course just opening an exit door replica you could do for ~free
I think mock slide deployment could be made much cheaper than 30k - e. g. high-volume compressors can be used instead of gas canisters, the materials can be cheaper because there is no weight or temperature requirements, etc.
Fair, since it doesn’t actually need to work well enough for emergencies you’re presumably looking at bouncy castle levels of spending.
And no bills from the coast guard. (All these devices have distress beacons that activate automatically)
Paying to break things is a valid business plan. In Tokyo, stressed business men can pay to break dishes by throwing them against a wall.
https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/dishing-out-anti-s...
I think the mock exit door would only be interesting with the corresponding emergency slide. The only problem is that in almost all cases where the emergency slide has been deployed and used, at least some passengers have been injured beyond a minor scrape - think severe sprains and tears, a broken bone, etc.
The purpose of the slide is to 1) empty the plane _very_ quickly 2) without causing a life threatening injury. Most people are not going to be injured using it, but some will and it's not really worth the small chance your leg gets fucked up forever from being ejected the wrong way.
Ah, you have intrusive thoughts as well. I mention it only to say that someone at my local grocery does not, based on the fact they thought to type up, print and post a sign saying PLEASE DO NOT POKE THE WATERMELONS thinking that would lead to a decrease in watermelon finger strikes.
Sounds like they're having issues with people thinking you can poke, prod, or drum on watermelons to check "ripeness" but it got lost in translation to "non-confromtstional."
Maybe? I am well aware/ don't care about watermelon ripeness because I find watermelon to be a complete waste of time 90% of the time. But now I want to poke them.
Safety mechanisms are often inherently unsafe, because they are safer than the alternative, so you don't want people playing with them. e.g. You cat cut yourself on the glass of a fire alarm, or break an ankle on an emergency exit slide.
Safety mechanisms are not inherently unsafe. A very small minority that leverage fast-deploying mechanics are, however the majority of safety is neutral. Life vests, eye protection, fall harness, emergency brake, electrical gloves, etc don't actively harm the person.
Valid. Maybe something can be learned from using them more frequently, either by the maker or by the user.
> I've never broke / pulled a fire alarm, I'm sure I can, but let me.
Man. I did as a kid in school. I did some stupid "I am not touching it" games on the glass front and that button sucked itself in like I was opening a hatch on ISS. "Push hard" my ass. Firefighters popped up, I was so embarrassed to apologize to teachers, firefighters, school principal and even colleagues who complained for some reason about the unscheduled break. It wasn't even cold outside then!
My dad knew the right people and somehow bailed me out, but I still feel awkward passing by their main station where I also had to show up to explain myself. That was effing 35y ago, roughly!
I mean, I am mostly over it. But I wouldn't call it a win :)
This is an obvious and simple idea and definitely should be driven by the FAA. Also, make sure the door goes somewhere cold like a freezer. Too many passengers dress for their destination airport and not their destination climate.
That is a great idea. Would be fun to play on for the kids too.
Lets not teach kids to open plane doors for fun.
No, this is backwards. Fun is trying new things (I think it's evolutionary mechanism that ensure kids are learning by default), and once the thing has been tried, it's not new anymore, so won't be tried again. Best thing we can actually do is to channel that, as OP proposed.
If only we had cheap, multi-use inflatable exit ramps that deflate, fold and stow themselves after use. Which is not a thing, apparently.
This is how so many fires start. Kids are stupid (it's biological, brain hasn't developed, they can't help it). Fire is exciting. Then they go experiment with fire in a place you really shouldnt -> whoops, something burns down because they don't know how aggressive a fire is in real life and how hard it is to put out.
But if you give them the boyscout/camping treatment of having them light a fire so many times it becomes boring, let them play with matches, move burning logs with thick gloves and practice putting out controlled campfires safely it becomes boring, normal, and the excitement goes away.
>and once the thing has been tried, it's not new anymore, so won't be tried again
There must be something in the water here, because kids here do it over and over again, usually ending up they getting hurt/nearly hurt or told to stop.
Yeah, no, that's not how it works. Need to do it many times before something is not fun. Just look at computer games.
Well, the way my parents discouraged me from smoking was, they brought a pack of cigarettes home and let me have one. Was awful, never wanted to try it again. That was an important life lesson for me.
You can't open the emergency doors while the cabin pressure is higher than outside pressure, if that's what you're worried about. And I think they don't let kids sit at the emergency exit either, because the person sitting there needs to be physically capable to remove the door, which has some weight to it.
I just dont want my kids to think its ok to play with the doors on a plane.
Then don’t let them. Take responsibility for your children :)
I don’t think anyone wants to send that message.
I guess the point is to teach how to use these mechanisms - so that there is no confusion in case an actual emergency happens.
Opening doors isn’t fun. School busses would be un workable with that back door if it was.
But what if it improves everyone’s safety?
The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate. Manufacturers can stick with tempered glass if they beef up the side curtain airbags enough to prevent ejection, which is exactly what happens on a lot of base models and rear windows to keep BOM costs down. The list of brands using laminated glass is accurate, but it applies mostly to their premium trims or front rows only.
There is also the issue of fleet turnover. With the average age of US vehicles pushing 13 years, the install base is still overwhelmingly tempered glass. Writing off the tool entirely because new luxury cars have moved on ignores the reality of what people are actually driving. You are statistically much more likely to be trapped in a 2012 Civic than a 2025 S-Class.
It did cover that. And half the tools couldn’t break the tempered glass either.
The smartest thing to do would be to check your car’s windows for any indication (the AAA report, page 19, cited in the article has examples) of whether they’re laminated or tempered. AFAICT, whether my new-ish Subaru Ascent’s windows are laminated depends on location (front or rear) and installation differs between the Ascent trims. Best to check for your specific car and where you’re likeliest to be sitting.
> You are statistically much more likely to be trapped in a 2012 Civic than a 2025 S-Class.
This is probably also very much true on a per mile basis.
If you can afford an 2025 S-class you can afford to fly for medium distance travel, you probably aren't slogging out a long commute because you live in one of those rich inner suburbs. You leave the house at reasonable hours and get home at reasonable hours, etc, etc.
There's all sorts of stuff that's just a proxy for generalized correlation with wealth and wealthy lifestyles.
> The article glides over the fact that FMVSS 226 is a performance standard, not a materials mandate.
Nope. The article states the following just after the table:
> It's true that not all automakers have switched over to laminated glass for the side windows; the FMVSS 226 law stipulates that you can get around it if you install elaborate side airbags that also prevent ejection.
As the grandparent points out, although the article says that, the actual regulation does not. The regulation says you have to prevent side ejections, it doesn’t say how. You can read it yourself:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.226
> Ejection mitigation countermeasure means a device or devices, except seat belts, integrated into the vehicle that reduce the likelihood of occupant ejection through a side window opening, and that requires no action by the occupant for activation.
Lamination and side airbags seem to be the way it’s usually done today, but nothing prevents a better way.
How?
One way (which the regulation mentions) is by not having a window next to a given seat in the first place
Another might be the bars or steel mesh that they weld over the windows in prisoner transport vehicles
Disclosure: I work for a car company, not on this.
If you want to be prepared for automotive incidents:
1. Check your mood and intoxication level before and while driving. Mood is more important than everything besides drugs and alcohol.
2. Left turns (or across traffic as applicable) are dangerous. Take extra care while turning left (or across traffic).
3. Using screens at night is bad for everyone, but especially above the age of 40, both focus and iris (light balance) response take longer. Using a screen changes your focus and blows out your night vision.
4. If your car has pushbutton electronic door openers, PRACTICE opening the door without battery power.
> If your car has pushbutton electronic door openers, PRACTICE opening the door without battery power.
Please stop building cars with this "feature." We honestly should make them illegal.
I think the removal of standard manual doors is the actual crime
And we as consumers should also take responsibility and simply not buy these vehicles.
The good news is that at least as it pertains to getting rid of physical controls, automakers have largely learned their lesson and are trying to go back as fast as reasonably possible (while also trying to balance recouping the tooling costs from fewer buttons). VW was heavily heavily criticized and is bringing it all back.
I’m confident that if consumer sentiment starts to skew one way regarding electronic door handles, we will also see a reversal. What is unfortunate now is that other automakers are following the lead that Tesla set. Tesla essentially proved one type of electronic door and it is engineered in such a way to be cheap and reliable enough. I’m confident that if engineers are given the space to really innovate and explore ideas, they can find something that is both better mechanically while remaining highly aerodynamic.
> VW was heavily heavily criticized and is bringing it all back.
ID.BUZZ with physical controls would be my dream car, no joke.
Currently the main issues for me are the shitty touch buttons and underpowered heater (it's the same as in the ID.4, which has like 30% of the interior volume of the BUZZ...)
At least Tesla does have a very easily accessible button to manually open the door
Didn't they only add those after losing a lawsuit?
And, I swear I heard about another one for cyber trucks, but with the vitriol surrounding them I'm not even going to try and find it.
I have no idea, don’t own a Tesla and haven’t been in one that often.
Looks like some models might have the manual door release switch easily accessible in the front but not in the back, about what you’d expect from Tesla.
At least the fact that they have a decent solution shows that there’s no reason this has to be a problem for electric doors.
It's not a bad feature. My fancy car has them, and it can watch for traffic and stop/slow you opening the door if there's a car coming up that maybe you didn't see (or look for).
And on mine, the same handle that you push to open with electricity will also open manually if you pull it twice. Which is handy, because the 12v battery failed in the first year. Feels like 12v batteries are a lot less reliable lately.
Getting in from the outside with the manual handle isn't so obvious, it's kind of hidden at the back of the handle.
>3. Using screens at night is bad for everyone, but especially above the age of 40, both focus and iris (light balance) response take longer. Using a screen changes your focus and blows out your night vision.
On that note, if anyone with Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, et al. would like to revisit the way their apps handle ride assignment - specifically, the way platforms generally refuse to assign orders when the car is stationary, but then inundate contractors with notifications that must be responded to immediately when the car is in motion - it'd be much appreciated.
I don't know why I'm asking here. I should be writing my legislative reps to get a law passed.
One of my pet peeves about screen UIs is that they're worse than they need to be for night use. Modern dark themes are blue-heavy, which negatively impacts both pupil response and bleaching more than colors of the same luminance with more green and red.
There should be two dark modes: a simple dark mode, like most dark themes today, to work in dimmed lighting, and an actual night mode, designed to be legible but not mess with adaptation in total darkness. I don't know the research on this (and I'm sure military and aviation have lots of data here), but intuitively it should use mostly thin red and green lines.
Some cars (Honda Civic) had this feature where you could change the theme of the UI and it had 3-4 presets (blue, red, amber, green IIRC). That was before those screens were just a built-in Android tablet and sadly it didn't carry over.
But you're right and it's the reason most german cars had red illuminated gauge clusters until a few years ago.
Give me back the Saab Night Panel. All I want is my speedo.
https://i0.wp.com/saabblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Ni...
Like nightmode in Stellarium: https://www.stellarium-labs.com/blog/nightmode/
Funnily enough the first comment in the article is "oh yeah, if you're in Tesla good fucking luck, their doors fail and the releases are incredibly hard to find in emergency"
The front ones seem easy enough, the rear ones are a lot harder
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2020_2024_modely/en_us/GU...
Spicy:
> Use caution when using the manual door release; the window will not automatically lower when the door is opened and damage to the window or vehicle trim may occur.
Manually opening the rear doors is a destructive operation!
Is it actually "destructive" or is it more of a "cramming the door seal over the window and flexing the widow assembly in a way that would result in more failure under warranty than they want if done regularly" type thing.
whoa.
> Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.
How is that even allowed?
I think that's exactly what they recently got sued for. Car caught fire, electrical stopped working (and therefore the doors stopped working) and a teen burned inside
It's wild how my car won't let me change basic settings while vehicle is in drive (too much menu nav as to be distraction & I've had cars that would only let me edit the navigation destination while in park) yet - this exists as well
You're forgetting the "people who don't care, they just want to be seen looking like they care so they make a bunch of noise" factor.
Once you multiply the safety problem by the this factor it all makes sense.
A small non-problem that every screeching jerk will be exposed to is a bigger actual problem more likely to get addressed than a potential real problem that will mostly go unnoticed.
Also rear doors are kinda optional. They still make 2door 2-row cars. Heck, they made 2-door 2-row SUVs pretty recently. And child safety locks are a thing. So there is an argument to be made there (not that I think it holds up on modern stuff).
The front ones vary and certain models are atrociously designed. If you get in an accident and have a concussion, and adrenaline, add a 10x difficulty factor
This is almost certainly what killed those kids in piedmont
I didn't find them hard to find (in the front seat). When I first got my car it kept complaining because I instinctively reached for that lever instead of the button. The computer claimed I could break the window if I kept using the manual lever, and I had to figure out where the button was.
Not saying the car is great, just that I found the door lever easily. I'd still rather have real controls (and a real sensor) for the wipers and the reliance on software and software updates makes me very nervous. You can't even open the glove box without a voice command or touch screen (as far as I can tell).
A better design would be for the 'button' to be a normal lever in the normal location, and the emergency manual release to be triggered by pulling that lever extra hard.
We could simplify this further!
Same. I’ve only ridden in one, but the owner wasn’t super happy when I instinctively pulled the manual lever to open the door.
There is no wrong way to open the door. Any suffering on the owner's part is caused by the manufacturer building the car that way. A car like that clearly isn't meant to carry untrained passengers. If the car owner insists on buying an unsuitable car, then that's on the owner. It's no different from buying a two seat sports car as a family of four.
Regarding screens: also make sure to configure the brightness correctly! I was recently driving with a relative in their new car at night, and the screen for navigation etc. was bright enough that I could see noticeably less than I'm used to. Turns out the screen does have separate brightness settings for day & night, but the night setting was at 4/10 per default (compared to 6/10 for the day setting). After lowering it to 1/10 the screen is still easily readable, and suddenly it's easy to see dark stuff again!
if you coudlld just remove the screens except for nav/media thatd be great
I've had 3 different 2013 model cars by different manufacturers, it was a great year for "just the right amount of tech" in a vehicle
Pretty sure almost any car shop can manage that for cheap. At the most basic level you could just wrap the bits you don’t want visible
What do you mean by mood?
To quote Groundhog Day, "Don't drive angry".
Any mood intense enough is extremely distracting and dangerous for driving, whether anger, infatuation, mourning, etc.
Because of this some countries have psychological testing to check your emotional stability when you get your license renewed, but realistically your emotions will be compromised for short durations much more often than that.
The test is a long term ( 15-30 minutes ) strict focus test. You don't have time to fully check everything you do on it, so you do your best and the psychologist verifies both that you have a sufficient ability to focus as a % of tasks reasonably responded to, and that you don't have large "emotional gaps" in your responses where your mind wandered to your bonnie for 45 seconds and you didn't interact with the tasks much or at all.
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None of these glass breakers are any good at what they're supposed to do anyways, I'd wager all of their websites delinate that they are for tempered glass only. What you want is porcelain or ceramic.
Unfortunately, afaik, porclean/cermaic glass breakers are illegal in most states. They are "Burglary Tools".
Nothing wrong with keeping a box of spark plugs in your center console though
A ceramic glass breaker isn't going to be any better than the metal tools on laminated glass, breaking the glass is only half the battle, you've still got to get through the intact glass pane held in place by the plastic laminate.
>Nothing wrong with keeping a box of spark plugs in your center console though
But then you've got to keep a tool to break the spark plug to give you a sharp ceramic shard to get through the glass.
Exactly. It’s the plastic middle layer that screws you.
Does a knife help there?
Sure, it’ll probably be pretty slow though. Ideally you’d have a serrated blade
That old spark plug thing was from when cars had tempered side windows, wasn't it? I don't see how those would be particularly effective at dealing with lamination.
Thieves in my city use the kind of automatic center punch that you can buy at any hardware store.
Broken spark plugs are also known as "ninja rocks," for what it's worth. Also considered illegal burglary tools in some states.
I fail to see how any of your suggestions are going to do any better on laminated glass. Breaking the glass isn’t the problem here, it’s the lamination.
Would a spark plug work on laminated glass?
Or when in something with windows like a Cybertruck maybe a 45
Just imagining firing that in a car is making my ears ring.
> None of these glass breakers are any good
...unless you're demonstrating unbreakable cybertruck glass to the world.
I bought a fire extinguisher recently but I’ve never used one. I have a faint idea of how it works and what kind of result I’d get based on what I’ve seen on TV. But if a serious fire ever breaks out I don’t even know if I’d even remember to grab and use it.
In a "serious" fire you should ignore the fire extinguisher get everyone out of the building.
Fire extinguishers are for small fires! If a little oil in your frying pan catches on fire and you don't have a lid readily available to smother it, use a fire extinguisher. But if your smoke alarm wakes you up and you discover your whole kitchen on fire, get out. The fire extinguisher will not help in that situation, and it may cause you to waste time. (Tip: If and only if the fire extinguisher is easily available, carry it with you as you exit. You might need it to use it clear a path to get out.)
Check the class of the fire extinguisher and if it is suited for liquid fires before using it on a oil fire.
A fire extinguisher is to clear a safe path to the exit if the fire blocks it. never put them by the exit door as I see so many people do (in their garrage)
they can also be used on small fires but only if there is a safe escape route. (This is probably the most common use but not the primary use)
99% of the benefit of putting the extinguisher by the exit door is that it helps draw panicking people to the exit door. Which gives them another saving throw against Heroic Idiocy, at +4 - "Should I grab this totally unfamiliar little fire extinguisher and carry it back toward the big scary fire, to do something I've never even tried doing? Or should I just run out the handy exit door that I'm right next to?"
> If a little oil in your frying pan catches on fire and you don't have a lid readily available to smother it, use a fire extinguisher.
We were told to just toss a large cloth on the fire in such cases.
That's right, the best is to have a watered dishcloth that will suffocate the fire, hence stopping it. The fire extinguisher may be a bad idea because the pressure will spread burning oil around across the kitchen and the water is definitively the worse idea because it will counterintuitively make a bigger flame and also spread burning oil.
Watered dishcloth? Water is the absolute last thing you want near very hot oil, never mind burning oil.
You're right, the best is a metal lid.
That works, but be sure to use a wool or cotton cloth.
——-
The proper method to deal with an oil fire: turn off the heat and smother the fire with a metal lid, metal baking sheet, or wool/cotton cloth. Do not use a fire blanket made of polyester or nylon; it will melt and burn producing toxic smoke. Do not use flour or any other flammable/explosive powder. Do not use water, as the liquid water will get into the oil and expand 1600 times its original size as it turns to steam; this rapid expansion will fling burning oil everywhere. If you do use an extinguisher, be careful not to spread the burning oil.
For small NON-OIL, non-electrical fires, smothering with a wet non-synthetic cloth is the best way to stop the fire.
When it happened here, I instinctively threw the flaming pan out the adjacent open door into the yard. We ate something else that day.
If you have an old one that you want to get rid of, it's a good idea to set up a controlled fire and try out your extinguisher on it. That way you can get some experience.
Really though, it mostly is just pull pin -> aim low (at the base and source of the fire) -> squeeze until extinguished. Sweep the nozzle from side to side to get proper coverage.
They're intended to be used by anyone with no training, so there's not much to go wrong (assuming you haven't bought the wrong type and use it on an oil fire, although most of the ones I see for sale for consumers are the powder kind, which work on anything. The water ones are the worst, and I've never seen one).
and it needs to be remembered not to hold the nozzle - aim with the whole extinguisher
nozzle gets veeery cold as gas expands, so you can get frost burns
I've seen a video of someone pointing an extinguisher the wrong way and blasting themself in the face! In their defense, they were under some stress.
As someone who has found themselves in a situation out in the wild with a fire and a fire extinguisher (neither of which were mine), with no direct extinguisher experience, you can take some solace in that they work very easily. They're not some wild hose that going to send you around the room. There's very little force. And you can simply fire it in bursts. It takes no time to get a feel for it and use it with precision.
If you find yourself with a fire and an extinguisher, do not hesitate to pull the pin, and go to it. You'll figure it out. In the end, you can't really make the situation worse.
If you're in the U.S., you might check if your local fire department has a CERT[0] training course. (I did it many years ago in San Francisco; they call it NERT for some reason.)
It'll give you a chance to practice putting out an actual fire, refresh first aid skills, learn the incident command system, learn basic search and rescue, and other preparedness skills to help yourself, your family, and neighbors in an emergency (in that order).
[0]: https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/individuals-communit...
In fire school we learned PASS -- pin, aim, squeeze, sweep. Even well-trained professionals need simple mnemonic devices.
Also, we never used a seatbelt ripper -- they don't work. All first responders carrier trauma shears. Those do work and have multiple purposes.
If you are looking to practice, the MythBusters said a fire extinguisher was an excellent way to quickly cool a case of beer. So, you can make it a $30 party trick and a teaching moment.
They were using carbon dioxide fire extinguishers, which are expensive (a couple hundred dollars, see [1] ) and not common in homes.
[1] https://fireextinguisherdepot.com/carbon-dioxide-fire-exting...
So, a $200 party trick when you are really committed to the bit.
Water extinguishers are almost completely useless.
I once had a go at putting out a fire in a waste paper bin with a water extinguisher, as part of a fire safety course. The burning paper just floated on the water as the bin filled up.
CO2 extinguishers are more effective. But I believe you have to be careful where you hold it or your skin may freeze onto it.
Get a fire blanket for your kitchen.
The time you want water is when something that water can soak into is on fire. Sofas, curtains, bedding, bookshelves, carpets, filing cabinets full of paper, etc.
The water soaks in and prevents the fire re-igniting. 30 years ago, workplaces contained a lot more filing cabinets and bookshelves, and smoking was more common.
CO2 is non-conductive, and less messy. It's also great at flowing around things, making it good for spraying through vents into electrical cabinets and car engines. Downside is the CO2 dissipates within a few seconds, so if the material is prone to re-igniting it's not such a good choice.
Dry powder is in between - the powder stays around, but doesn't soak in. It's a good choice if you're only going to get one extinguisher.
Water extinguishers are incredibly useful for putting out small incidental fires that can result from hot work without making a big mess. The kind of stuff you'd just move outside or let burn out rather than discharge a powder extinguisher over.
Nobody is whipping out a dry-chem extinguisher because the leaves under the workbench caught on fire from welding sparks.
Water mist fire extinguishers are nice. They are much more able to cool lightweight, flammable objects, and pose less risk of causing electrical arcs.
A couple years ago somebody parked a stolen car in front of our building, stuffed a rag in the fuel filler, and lit it. I must have pulled up just a couple minutes after they had left. Grabbed the fire extinguisher I kept under the seat and put it out. I had that extinguisher around for about 5 years. You never know when you'll need it.
When I was young we'd find expired fire extinguishers and go blast each other with em. Very easy to use. Good times. Hope they're not toxic...
My son picked up and used one effectively having about the same level of experience you do (none, but he knew the basic idea and had read the label). Can’t remember if he was 7 or 8 at the time, but either way I’m pretty sure you’ll be ok.
I mean, still doesn’t hurt to get more familiar, but…
You can just carry the Ripper.
https://www.aoe.net/product/the-ripper-window-glass-cutter/
I've used one (in training). Works great, nice clean cuts, but still a little slow. Quicker to just use an axe which, if you're a firefighter, you have handy. (Carefully chop around the perimeter of the windshield or side window. Use gentle blows to minimize dispersion of broken glass within the cabin.)
Okay now I'm imagining a classical ballet recreation of the "Heeere's Johnny" scene. With firemen.
Expensive, and pretty bulky to carry around along with an impact driver. There are less expensive, more compact hand-operated tools, e.g.:
https://www.lifelinerescuetools.com/products/lifeline-escape...
https://www.ajaxrescuetools.com/prod-20-1-127-28/extrication...
Whats weird is that I know of at least 8 “modern cars” 2018+ that all have had cracked windshields.
3 of them are mine, my 2002 car has taken huge rocks like a champ…
Its big glass im telling you, esp because the recalibration stuff for Assistive Steering is like 7-800 bucks.
Similar experience with a 2010 Honda Odyssey, drove it for 10 years and never saw a crack even though I'm sure it took a beating.
Then we got a 2022 Passport and I swear every single trip has a new crack or chip. I was surprisingly fortunate to be talked into the windshield warranty as the sales guy has been through this exact thing and replacing these windshields with assistive tech is expensive. That warranty has already paid for itself and more including once full windshield replacement.
Huh, odd. I have a car with assistive controls and they also tried to talk me into this warranty but I declined. They mentioned replacement would require extra money.
I did end up getting a windshield replacement shortly after purchase (like 6 months into ownership a rock came out of a truck and hit my windshield). I got it replaced for the normal $100-$200 not from the dealership and the vision system has had no issues.
Laminated glass does not prevent routine stone chip events – if a tiny fragment of the stone becomes wedged in the outer ply or at the laminate interface at a tension point and, coupled with the temperature difference (inside the cabin vs ambient), cabin pressure and body flex that often place higher tensile stress lower on the windscreen, the crack can start propagating very quickly.
That was my experience earlier in the year: I was driving alongside a large fuel tanker on a city road when a tiny stone chip, probably thrown up from under the tanker’s tyres, struck the front windscreen. It took about an 1 ½ hour for the initially invisible crack to spread into an irreparable 30 cm one – effectively right in front of my eyes – and the windscreen had to be replaced. Lesson learned: do not drive anywhere near large trucks or fuel tankers or maintain a larger distance.
But the laminated glass will prevent the structural collapse of the windshield and will also prevent the occupants from being showered with glass shards. It is also more likely that the windshield will withstand an impact from a large stone, leaving a localised and static crack that can be repaired with resin.
> ...and will also prevent the occupants from being showered with glass shards.
Hasn't it been the case for a long time now that glass in automobiles is coated so that it breaks into small, generally-square fragments, rather than shards?
I've never smashed a window myself, but every couple of months, I see the remains of a window smashing on the sidewalk... it's always a pile of small, generally-square fragments.
My memory tells me that this design was mandated long ago because folks would get shards embedded in them effectively forever. One of my parents related a story that one of the parents up the tree would irregularly have to extract migrating glass shards breaking through the skin of his face that had been embedded during an automobile accident many years prior. But, perhaps that story is bullshit and completely fabricated, IDK.
That's tempered glass which breaks into the safer fragments. Still not completely safe obviously, especially if stuff is getting thrown around violently in an accident. The bigger safety case for laminated glass though is since it sticks together your body or limbs can't fly out through it in a rollover accident (even if belted can happen on the sides). There's also some fringe benefits: noise isolation, UV protection, and supposedly more annoying for thieves.
The table from the report shows that the tools do crack the window but don't break it. Which is probably the main difference between old glass and the newer layered glass? If you crack an outer layer it is no longer usable, but you can't escape through it.
> the recalibration stuff for Assistive Steering is like 7-800 bucks
Yeesh at that point I'd just be buying a Comma.
Usually the glass companies force you to pay it. For “safety”. It’s just a “you have a nice car so we’re gonna charge you more” fee.
I’ll probably be doing my own windshield on my Tesla to avoid this. Safelight has decent prices but whacks you with a huge fee for pressing “calibrate” in the service menu, which is user accessible.
Hold up you can calibrate it yourself? I was under the impression you need additional hardware jigs to align cameras to fixed points, similar to a steering alignment.
Hey, it could be worse. I had the windshield on my newish S-class start smoking and quickly crack after.
Much like cell phone screens, altering the glass to make catastrophic failures less likely makes cracking more likely.
Simple. Just make sure you test your glass breaker on your car side window before you drive off the road or bridge into a deep lake.
Not sure about the "car falls into the lake" scenario, but I know some women who carry these for fear of a crazed Uber driver who might lock them in the car.
You can just unlock the door and exit the car in that case-- there's no way to "lock someone in" unless you've modified the lock somehow. And if someone did that, they probably reinforced the glass too.
Child safety locks do this. They prevent the rear doors from being unlocked and opened from the inside.
Well, I learned something new today! I always thought that kind of thing would be illegal because it's a fire hazard -- if the driver was unconscious after an accident, the passengers could be trapped in a burning car.
The crazy Uber drivers would replace their windows with plexiglass if that caught on.
You are assuming a crazed uber driver is smart and knowledgeable enough to do that, but 90% of people driving ubers to start with are doing so because they don't have those kind of skills or knowledge.
Well, this is a whole different kind of ignorant.
I think the crazy kidnappers might have another reason for doing it other than lacking skills.
Your threat model is incoherent.
For anyone looking for an in-vehicle EDC to solve this problem I'd recommend a Keetch tool. I used them in the fire service with great success on the laminated glass of a windscreen. I assume it'd work equally well on a laminated side window glass - though I've not tried. Nice thing is that the sharp spike on it would work quite well on tempered glass too (though we had proper glass breakers for that).
Victorinox tried to address this with this tool, not sure how successful https://www.victorinox.com/en-DE/Products/Swiss-Army-Knife%E...
There is a video of this tool being used to cut windshield (laminated) glass. It is not remotely practical:
https://youtu.be/LEHl6_ye9as?si=68rwouxAHWcurZ5O&t=73
Seems like they did it the by-the-book way for the commercial, rather than the panicked-escape real-world way... i.e. I'd do one vertical cut in the middle, then I'd be frantically pulling the glass shards out by hand (or claw hammer if available).
It's a shame AAA's testing wasn't more extensive. They should have determined the best tool for a quick exit... Crowbar, wood saw, large serrated knife, or can opener for example.
Multitools with glass breakers seem likely to be more durable and not fall apart like the cheap plastic hammers. e.g. Leatherman SIGNAL and $35 clones like B0BRRXVW9T. They also have knife blades, saw blades, pliers, and can openers for a good selection of alternative options to test out.
Because it's slow to use? The video does show it working fine. For the "someone locked me in the car" use case it seems OK?
I think it's fine for the "sinking in a lake" case too? The water pressure prevents the door from opening, and my understanding was you want the car to fill with water fast enough you can take a breath, let the pressure equalize, then open the door. You're likely not going to get out through a broken window while the water is pouring in through it (I guess if you're fast enough to still be above the water line), so by the time that stops it doesn't seem like there'd be much difference between opening the door and maneuvering through the much smaller window.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC68mflUEwc
404 from US IP address.
Rescue tool?
https://www.victorinox.com/en-US/Products/Swiss-Army-Knife%E...
404. This one, perhaps?
https://www.victorinox.com/en-DE/Products/Swiss-Army-Knife%E...
Here's that YouTube link without the tracking parameter:
https://youtu.be/LEHl6_ye9as?t=73
Firefighters and other emergency service personnel can get through laminated glass, but it takes much more time and effort, as well as tools you're not likely to have in your car.
Oh cool. I bought the same model as that image for my girlfriend's kid yesterday
In 15 years: Testing shows that automotive shaped charge glassbreakers can't penetrate the armor on most modern automotive glass.
Was drone-proofing civilian cars a mistake?
Can I still remove the headrest and use it to break glass?
This is apparently a mix of myth and misleading information: They can't be used to directly break the glass like these devices were designed to, they were never designed for this purpose as people claim, and even the "lever it between the glass and door" method only works with tempered glass and not the laminated glass that's used in newer cars.
Plus not all headrests can be removed anyway.
I wonder why is this not part of the standard safety tests. It can be done before a crash test, for instance.
What exactly are you proposing gets tested? The windows are supposed to be hard to break so people don’t fly out of them…
Hard enough to not fly out accidentally but weak enough that people can break them on purpose so they're not trapped inside.
I think there's an impossibly thin line between making glass that's easy to break through on purpose, but hard for a high speed head to break through in an accident.
I'm fairly sure that the two lines are way past each other, on the wrong side. The force with which you'll be flung against the glass is much higher than what you can punch.
This isn’t about punching, it’s about using one of those handheld devices with a pointed metal tip.
It's worse than impossibly thin. It's a massive gray area of acceptable solutions where no matter where in the area you choose some bike shedding jerk will be able to construe it as though you chose wrong.
Most tempered glass does it just fine and has for decades.
We have airbags, what if there was a low cost manual way to trigger a window break, potentially even without vehicle power?
That's what seat belts are for. Making unbreakable glass is morally repugnant.
This law is intended to protect belted occupants as well. The target here is rollover crashes where belted occupants may still be jostled partially free from the belt and be partially ejected.
Not relevant. Safety designs that kill people are indefensible.
> Safety designs that kill people are indefensible.
Then it logically follows that either the only defensible approach is to not have any safety solutions, or that there simply isn’t a defensible approach.
The tradeoffs are unavoidable, a seatbelt or airbag might very well kill someone despite saving countless lives. Even tech like lane departure warnings will almost inevitably distract and kill someone.
I'm going to guess that you don't work on safety engineering. All safety designs have tradeoffs. Airbags can kill you but we still use them because the probable benefits outweigh the risks.
Airbags do not kill people. There were fewer than 300 airbag-related deaths of the course of two decades, and the vast majority of those deaths were caused by not wearing a seatbelt.
> Airbags do not kill people.
> fewer than 300 airbag-related deaths
So, they do kill people.
They kill people at a low enough rate that make them both worth installing, and mandating, compared to the alternatives.
Frontal airbags, generally speaking, make people who would've died survive and make people who would've walked away with nothing look like they went a few rounds with a professional boxer. It's a flattening effect.
And in that time how many deaths were attributed to laminate glass?
This is literally the logic anti-seatbelt folks use. “I don’t wear a seatbelt because if I’m in a crash, the seatbelt could end up trapping me in a fire.”
Safety design very often involves trade offs. The chances you get partially ejected and killed during a rollover are meaningfully higher than the chances you die because you can’t break the glass to get out. Do you even keep a glass breaker in your car or do you imagine after surviving a wreck that’s trapped you inside your car that you will have the strength to just punch through a glass window?
Wait till someone tells this guy about the trolley problem.
Exiting through a window is probably not a common case. Or even entering from outside to retrieve a person.
I think likely much better would be to mandate solution that forces doors to fully unlock in case of a crash or large water ingress.
The problem isn't that doors don't unlock, it's that you can't open the door against the massive water pressure, or against the door crumpling in itself and ruining the mechanism.
I just keep a tomahawk axe in my car. That works.
So the spark plug ceramic trick only works on older cars?
“It's easy to convince EDC people to buy EDC things. But how do you convince non-EDC folks to buy your product?”
Am I the only one who doesn’t know what EDC is?
Every Day Carry. Nerds on reddit pump each other up to carry a bunch of nominally practical stuff around every day like pocket knives and glass breaking tools and seat belt cutters and such.
Hilarious! Thank you!
EDC is when you carry 3 different sized pocket knives, a flashlight, a watch, a weird high tech pen, a card holder, a gun – and everything is color matched and presented nicely in a photograph you post on reddit.
I didn't know either, Google of just "EDC" figured it out though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyday_carry
If you cant break something, steal it.
Useful tech post!
> "The fantasy being peddled by the toolmakers is: You will crash, remain conscious, find that your car has burst into flame or is slowly sinking in water, find that you cannot undo your seatbelt, yet are still able to reach for this specialty tool, slice through your seatbelt, then smash the window open and climb free to safety."
Uh huh... Now consider this scenario; you lose control and crash into a tree. You are out and your car catches fire. Who gets to the scene first? Firefighters, or probably just whichever randos happened to be right there when it happened? Probably the later. Probably for the best if one of them is able to break your window and pull you out.
Yes, which is why the article reaches that exact conclusion.
Have a crowbar handy. It's known to be useful in a variety of situations, including a literal space alien assault.
But also don’t leave it loose in your vehicle. A crowbar hitting your head in a car accident does not sound like a good time.
Better than a gnome rattling around in the car.
True. But I fail to see the relevance.
As others mentioned, it is an achievement from Half Life episode 2. Player has to carry a garden gnome to the end of the game. Which is not too bad, minus the extensive driving sections (sometimes under fire) where the gnome is bouncing around the vehicle.
It is a fun feather in your cap, but definitely not suitable for a first run through of the game.
Ah, thank you. I’ll admit to never having played it.
I assume this is the relevance:
https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/Gnome_Chompski
https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Garden_Gnome
It’s another Half-Life reference
A small charge of C4 works wonders. Just be sure to lay your head over in the passenger seat before detonation.
I carry a small hatchet in the trunk of my car with the spare tire just for this reason.
We're gonna need a source on that one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(game_engine)
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oh just get Franz von Holzhausen to throw a ball bearing at it
The problem isnot cracking the glass. The problem is breaking it apart enough to get through. Your reference joke is not quite appropriate to this context.
So no fast rescue of children and dogs in cars in the summer heat anymore
What are the police to do when some insane sovcit refuses to exit the car over a speeding ticket? Those windows aren’t going to break themselves.
The fact that you're trying to optimize for "police serving speeding tickets to insane sovcits" over "getting flung out of the car in an accident and being crushed by the car" makes me glad you don't design cars.
Why should they exit a car over a speeding ticket? A speeding ticket is not a jail sentence and does not warrant an arrest. In fact unless a driver is actively trying to harm somebody or has an active arrest warrant there is no reason whatsoever for them to leave their car or allow cops to remove people from cars.
In some states, it is the law that officers can order you to step out of the vehicle during any valid traffic stop, regardless if it is criminal or civil.
In some states it is the law that if you are from out of state and get a speeding ticket, you either have to pay the officer in cash while you are stopped or they can take you to jail until money is posted or it is your court date.
This happened to a friend of mine from Wisconsin, visiting me in Michigan about ten years ago. I was shocked to learn this was actual Mochigan law, and could hardly believe it even after verifying it. He felt very “lucky” to have had several hundred dollars in cash to simply hand over to the officer. Michigan only just rescinded those laws in 2019: https://landline.media/michigan-laws-end-roadside-cash-payme...
I can't wait for police badges to double as contactless payment terminals.
New Mexico has it.
It's actually great. Their tickets are (or were) cheap and not reported to insurance if paid on the spot.
Far superior to the "pretend it's more than 1% about safety and peddle it to the worst kind of people" approach that most other states take with speeding enforcement IMO.
Our (Poland) police does have payment terminals...
In the sovereign citizen cases they are talking about, the typical case is that the vehicle is not registered/doesn't have plates and the driver refuses to identify themselves. They only barely lower the window if at all. They usually go back and forth a few times until the police tell them they are under arrest for multiple reasons relating to driving without a license and failure to identify.
The glass breaking happens after multiple offices have arrived for backup as the person usually gets dragged from the car screaming. The videos are extremely entertaining to watch.
The combination of unregistered vehicle, failure to prove the driver has a license, and the drivers insisting they should be allowed to drive away is absolutely a combination where arrest is legal.
You don't necessarily have to if you're just getting a speeding ticket. But in order to write a speeding ticket, you have to hand over a valid Driver's License so they know who to ticket. Exactly what should they do if the driver refuses to provide their Driver's License?