How To Escape A Sinking Car

If you’re like us, you’ve thought about how you’d escape your car in a variety of emergency scenarios. One of the scariest, in our opinion, is sitting inside your car, trapped as it’s sinking into a deep body of water. Maybe it’s because we’ve covered quite a few stories where bodies in cars have been recovered, but that just seems like an awful way to go.

Land Rover Discoveries on street tires get stuck in a mud bog.

Thankfully YouTube channel Adventures With Purpose, which has extracted countless cars from bodies of water all over the US and helped solve cold cases, has put together a nifty tutorial on this very situation.

As they say, knowledge is power and in this situation you hope to never find yourself in, you don’t have the luxury of time or trial and error to figure out how to get out of your sinking vehicle in the safest fashion. There’s been considerable debate on the topic for some time, but we appreciate someone with expertise showing what works best.

That’s right, AWP founder Jared Leisek drives an old Saturn into a manmade pond, using cameras to show what it’s like to be inside as it sinks. Before and after he talks about strategies for escaping a sinking car.

One thing Leisek makes clear: having a glass breaker is invaluable. If you don’t have one on your keyring or somewhere in your vehicle, now might be the time to get one. A lot of people think glass is easier to break than it is and that has cost them their life.

Leisek also explains why you want to get out of the car as quickly as possible. This flies in the face of the theory that it’s best to wait until the interior fills up with water, then swim out. We think the guy knows a thing or two and his advice appears to be quite solid.

You can watch the video and hear Leisek’s explanation for yourself, then either heed his advice or not. Plus, it’s nice to see a seatbelt cutter and window breaker in action, and not just in some classroom or junkyard setting.

Images via YouTube