Three teenagers were killed when their car skidded off the road in southern France, went through a wall and crashed upside down in a private pool, trapping them inside.
The vehicle was a similar size to the pool and the teenagers - aged 14, 15 and 19 - were unable to open the doors and drowned.
If you find yourself in a car sinking in water, conserve your energy because the doors will not open until your cabin is submerged. Take a deep breath at the last second that you can (you will need it) and wait until you are fully underwater to try to open the doors. This may not have been possible with the shallowness of the pool in the above news story. There are also specialized tools for breaking car windows that you can keep in your glove compartment for emergencies.
None of this helps you if there are concrete pool walls keeping the doors from opening
Definitely do this! I have bought these for myself and all of my family members thanks to the Mythbusters car submerging episode and news stories like these.
But also, be aware that they may not work at all on modern cars as many have switched to laminated glass for the side windows. Even Adam Savage has spoken about how this invalidates his recommendations and makes cars less safe in certain circumstances.
https://www.acg.aaa.com/connect/blogs/4c/auto/car-escape-tool-laminated-window-glass
Recently saw this on Lemmy, too. https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/35078257
This is a result of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 226, “Ejection Mitigation” in the US. It doesn’t explicitly require laminated glass, but the requirements it imposes leave basically no alternative.
The article mentioned that the pool was roughly the size of the car and that it would’ve been too snug for them to open the doors.
This is one of those one in 1 trillion situations where everything had to work out exactly for it to happen.
This particular manner of death is one in a trillion. The odds that these three were going to die in a car together was quite a bit closer to parity.
the car was the size of the swimming pool, and upside down, so they had no chance to exit it
Someone very recently posted a study on those tools with the warning that 1) some of them sold aren’t that great and may break when used, but more importantly 2) newer cars are using similar/same glass on the side windows now, which would make it much harder to break out.
I didn’t see at the time anything in the comments on a solution other than trying it anyway or maybe kicking out the side or front window with your feet. In the posted situation it was just a freak situation where there is no solution, the car being upside down and the same size as the pool. If the water is coming in, there is no where to go.