> 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.

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"

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.

>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.

if you coudlld just remove the screens except for nav/media thatd be great

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.

> 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.

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.)

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...

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).

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.

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.

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.

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…

Thieves in my city use the kind of automatic center punch that you can buy at any hardware store.

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.

> None of these glass breakers are any good

...unless you're demonstrating unbreakable cybertruck glass to the world.

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.

Broken spark plugs are also known as "ninja rocks," for what it's worth. Also considered illegal burglary tools in some states.

Would a spark plug work on laminated glass?

Or when in something with windows like a Cybertruck maybe a 45

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.)

The crazy Uber drivers would replace their windows with plexiglass if that caught on.

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

404. This one, perhaps?

https://www.victorinox.com/en-DE/Products/Swiss-Army-Knife%E...

404 from US IP address.

Rescue tool?

https://www.victorinox.com/en-US/Products/Swiss-Army-Knife%E...

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.

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.

I didn't know either, Google of just "EDC" figured it out though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyday_carry

What exactly are you proposing gets tested? The windows are supposed to be hard to break so people don’t fly out of them…

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.

Yes, which is why the article reaches that exact conclusion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.