We know that Hollywood scriptwriters and their stuntmen enablers rely on the “fact” that cars explode. But do they? The NY Daily News reports that an SUV exploded after being struck by an OOC Benz in Benzonhurst. Just kidding—which I shouldn’t do as a dog died in this accident. Well, not IN the accident . . . And I know: the Element isn’t really an SUV (more like a box-shaped wheelchair). And we only have the News’ word that “The Honda exploded on impact, and flames shot from the engine before engulfing most of the vehicle.” Oh, did I forget “witnesses said”? My bad. So I’m interested in your expert opinion on cars, gasoline and ka-boomery. What’s the real deal here? Do we really have to worry about fleeing an accident before a careless cigarette ignites that trickling trail of gas?
When they are Fords.
I’ve seen two Fords spontaneously combust. Both were Tempo / Topaz models, and both were aflicted by a poorly designed ignition switch.
Austin Greene:
Combustion I get. But explosions. What’s up with that?
I’m suprised they don’t explode more often, especially if a car has an almost empty tank of gas.
They probably have some sort of system in place to allow fumes to escape or something… right?
They do explode (think ball-of-flame-small-mushroom-cloud, not landmine-shrapnel-everywhere), but in my experience they are burning well and all over before that happens. Usually the fire department is already on the scene, so the event is rather late in the carBQ (sorry about that).
I have no idea of the probability a collision will get a car to start burning, though.
A friend of mine once had a LeBaron spontaneously combust and burn to the ground, but it definitely didn’t explode.
Cars basically don’t ever explode action-movie-style, unless rigged with explosives to do so deliberately.
In the linked article, there’s a picture of a burning-but-intact Element. It certainly did not explode. The intact-but-burned husk also indicates that it did not explode.
I think everyone in Brooklyn forgot the difference between a fire and an explosion.
To look at that picture it burned. If the back wheels were the same as the front, then it had steel wheels. Where is that back wheel? Perhaps it flew off but more likely it’s under the SUV, right near… yes, the gas tank. If that tank was punctured by debris and the vehicle was sliding across the pavement on a steel wheel where do you think those sparks were going? It’d be a miracle if it DIDN’T catch on fire.
I once slammed into the back of an abandoned Ford Maverick on the freeway that exploded on impact. I came over a hill at night, at full freeway speed, and there it was, no flashers on, with no lane available to steer around it. It was indeed a large ball of fire. I remember feeling the heat from the explosion on my face. I thought my car was on fire too, but it wasn’t. The pavement was covered with fuel and that fuel was on fire though. The car I hit was engulfed, but mostly toward the rear of the vehicle where the unprotected gas tank was. At the time when I exited my vehicle I did not know the car I hit was abandoned, so I immediately tried to help the occupants from the vehicle. I did manage to get both the driver and passenger door open before realizing nobody was in the car. I burned my coat and gloves, but not much else.
I attended the Bathurst motor racing weekend for many years in the eighties. Thousands of young men camped and drank and looked for fun. Local farmers would bring old clunkers and they’d do donuts until they died and then we’d set them on fire. We must’ve burned 40 or 50 cars over the years and not one exploded. We always hoped to get six small bangs – one from each tire, one from the fuel tank and one from the sump. They were just small ‘whooshes’. No chance of injury except from stumbling, drunk into the inferno.
When you tick off the Russian mafia…
Speaking cars that combust, I’ve seen numerous Hondas (especially Odyssey Minivans and CR-V’s) catch fire, followed by Chrysler LeBaron’s and then Fords.
I think mythbusters covered this a few years ago. They came to the conclusion that cars don’t explode unless ‘helped’ along.
when they hit IEDs.
When Icelanders can no longer afford their range rovers so they blow them up for the insurance money. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102119511
All I know is that I once rolled a car (Think of the ’55 Chevy in American Graffitti) and it didn’t blow up. Had it been a movie, just after I got out of the car the gas tank would have exploded and the car would have been engulfed in flames.
I had an Oldsmobile engine flame out, then flame on; does that count? I mean, there was real fire in there, but it was er.. on the OUTSIDE of the engine. I remember thinking, “well now, that ain’t right…”
I was a dumbass 20-something, I was lucky the whole car didn’t go up in flames that day!
———————
On an unrelated matter, I’m wondering what gives with the article pictures lately? They’re monumentally uninspiring, boring, or just plain ugly. Sometimes, all three! Or is it just me?
To wit: Low Rider Mitzvah (boring and ugly), Frank Rich (you decide), the crusher pic (abwack, whatever that word was; depressing!), the Smart Car skeleton, the Rover pic, the BMW X1 (tiny, unrevealing…was it a cell phone pic?), the dead car twitter pic, the exploded car pic, the Chevrolet poster (I swear I smelled the mustiness emanating from my screen), the Waggoner/Granholm pic: Musty too! But also uninspiring, boring AND ugly…times two! Although I must admit that the irony of the sign made me smile.
It’s Monday morning and I’m already tired of it all. I’m in desperate need for something stylish and inspiring. Not a depressing pic of a dead car, a media person I’m not likely to read or watch anyhow, or (PLEASE!) a dinosaur (ex)CEO or another dinosaur politician…or worse yet, BOTH at the same time!
I haven’t seen a car explode, hopefully I will NEVER get to.
One can only hope…
The only vehicular explosion I’ve seen was an RV.
About ten years ago I was driving to Los Angeles from Portland, Oregon in my Saturn SL2 on the I-5 late in the night. An RV was disabled on the side of the road and had a relatively small fire ignited in the rear of the vehicle.
This RV was a big sucker, and the police had it coned off while apparently waiting for the fire department (this was a sparsely-populated part of Oregon). As it was my turn to drive in the one remaining open lane the thing went kaboom, blowing out the back end of the coach and making a fireball that lit up the surrounding landscape.
The heat was so intense INSIDE my car that I pulled over at the next offramp to verify that my plastic side panels hadn’t melted off the car. Remarkably they hadn’t.
The RV didn’t look like it was involved in a collision, so I’m guessing some sort of shoddy manufacturing and relaxed fuel safety standards for RVs were to blame.
The RV didn’t look like it was involved in a collision, so I’m guessing some sort of shoddy manufacturing and relaxed fuel safety standards for RVs were to blame.
RV’s often have propane tanks for cooking, it probably exploded from the heat.
An explosion occurs when a rapidly expanding force is constrained by its surroundings. When the force expands sufficiently fast, even air can provide a constraint.
But gasoline does not expand with sufficient force, on its own.
So what you need to do, is to evaporate the gasoline first, or achieve a “fine mist distribution” of the gasoline, before ignition.
We used to demonstrate this in the military, using exploding markers (think very large firecracker.) We’d fill a balloon with kerosene, and attach the balloon to the marker with tape. Light the marker, and time the throw, to achieve an air burst. The initial explosion fractures the kerosene, before it ignites. Would scare the hell out of the red team.
So – how would you achieve something similar in a car?
As someone wrote above, if you had little fuel in the tank, and the tank was one interior space (not subdivided with separators to prevent sloshing), you’d get a space where the gasoline could turn into mist, from the agitation of the crash. But gas tank design works hard to prevent exactly that.
Another scenario would have the gasoline somehow entering the car interior, as a spray, providing a fine distribution, and then igniting, with the interior providing constriction, thus building the force of the explosion before the windows give.
But again – a lot of ifs. What people are seeing is combustion, not explosions, except when they’re watching movies. One problem with all those explosions in movies (where the cars are filled with a lot of additional fuel and dynamite) is that it scares people away from approaching wrecks, as they fear any car will behave like that.
The two posts immediately preceding mine illustrates what can cause an explosion:
A burning RV. With what is described as a minor fire in the rear area.
Slow heat build-up may cause the gasoline to evaporate or cook, before the tank blows, and you then get the kerosene-balloon scenario.
Or – more likely given the description of the nature of the explosion – a propane cannister or tank has been in the fire, and eventually goes off. Probably a cannister, those can provide some amazing explosions, as there is initial constraint. With a cannister, you could even get a two stage detonation – with the cannister first going because of pressure buildup, and then the gas expanding rapidly filling the interior of the RV, mixing with air, before detonating when the flame ignites the gas.
What your kids are up to illustrates the cannister explosion. The last one is actually the most dangerous, in the RV example, as a lot of gas escapes without igniting, This could fill the interior, before detonating. But even the small cannister would blow out the windows and structure. In open air, it’s not as dangerous (flying bits of metal, of course.)
Detonations are usually a combination of combustion and ignition.
Combustion – the process of burning something
Explosion – a violent and destructive shattering or blowing apart of something, as is caused by a bomb.
• technical: a violent expansion in which energy is transmitted outward as a shock wave.
Detonation – the action of causing a bomb or explosive device to explode.
• a loud explosion : a series of deafening detonations was heard.
• technical: combustion of a substance that is initiated suddenly and propagates extremely rapidly, giving rise to a shock wave
===
No longer able to detonate nuclear bombs for fun and empirical data gathering, the militaries of the US and Russia are engaged in a quest for the largest non-nuclear bomb. The US has developed the MOAB and the Russians countered with the FOAB. The Russian bomb is a vacuum device, which fractures liquid before ignition; and the US one is thermobaric, using a combination of specially designed explosive propellant and a restricting encasing shell. The shell weighs more than the propellant.
Maybe they were inspired by the Ford Pinto.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4597504248177533561
I’ve seen my share of car explosions in Lebanon, some Hostile others by accident. even the ones that are meant with explosives to kill and maim never look like the ones in Hollywood.
it just happens, one second it’s there next thing you know, it mayhem.
as for accidentally burning vehicles, i live by a busy highway and crashes happen on a daily basis. a BMW 535 caught fire once, and the resulting traffic delayed fire services to the scene. but when the car was almost completely destroyed, a thump was heard, the car barely shook, that was the gas tank rupturing, some fumes trapped inside made flames a little bigger, and the fuel spilled on the tarmac and burned pretty rapidly. the things that took longest and produced the most smoke were the seats, plastics and the tires.
i also have seen a truck take fire, but i guess being diesel powered the oil just burned. the funniest was a VW beetle. the guy came to a stop while flames were shooting out of the rear. he parked his car on the shoulder. collected somethings. hailed a taxi and left the scene. then fire services came. pretty hilarious.
but again, Hollywood explosions, and those done by Clarkson are cool to watch, because they look cool. but believe me nothing like the real thing in both accidental and criminal.
however if there is a video to prove me wrong, i would be interested to see.
According to the EMT’s at our firehouse, no.
BUT….the hazard at the accident scene is that the 5 mph 1-shot shock absorbers in bumpers tend to let go without warning, and if you happen to be walking past, it will cut you off at the knees.
“Waldo, they’re smoking, make them stop!!”
When Dateline NBC rigs Chevy trucks with bottle rockets.
BTW: it has been proven since that the Pinto was no more prone to rear end fires/explosions than the Vega, Gremlin or Dodge Colt of the period. Statistically it was the same. But it fucks up a good story to tell that part of it, right, Mother Jones ?
links: http://www.carforums.com
http://www.pointoflaw.com “Myth Of The Ford Pinto Case”
http://www.carlustblog.com
My “favorite” Ford Pinto explosion occurs in the movie Top Secret.
The secondary is particularly brutal.
Why (and When) Do Cars Explode?
Only when being investigated by NBC’s Dateline.
Why do some cars explode? Because it is better to burn out than to fade away. You should have known.
I had a cracked fuel pump that was sending about as much gas out of the car as to the engine. The trail of gasoline behind my car was like something out of a cartoon. I kept looking in my mirror expecting to see flames racing up behind me. I’m not ashamed to say I was sweating bullets until I was able to get it to the repair shop.
Cars explode all the time – usually in Englishtown NJ while running a quarter mile.
I’ve seen plenty of cars puke bottom ends and valve-train parts, some even catch fire, – it’s great fun.
-ted
Sometimes they explode when the owner can no longer make the payments.
In Pittsburgh a while back a car rammed a truck at an intersection, and the whole thing went up. The news stories all said explosion, for whatever that’s worth, but in any case it was hot enough to damage nearby buildings.
I’ve never seen a car explode…burn for sure…but not explode.
On a sort of related note, some guy in a junker Accord set my house on fire last Monday. His exhaust pipes had tongues of flame coming out when he was warming up, which I tried to warn him about (“turn off your f____ car!”). He must have tried again when I went inside b/c 2 hours later I notice a structure fire in my living room window frame…fire fully set, maybe 5 minutes from a full loss. I’m now looking at repairing a good amount of sheetrock, a non-standard window frame+glass and a hand that was used as an impromptu sledgehammer.
Now I have a question here, how the hell did that fire get to my house? I’m guessing the catalytic converter had something to do with it, or maybe just accumulated carbon in the exhaust itself…there must have been a solid ember of something that travelled the 15-20 feet to the window.
I was a fireman for 10 years. While I’ve put out many car fires I’ve not seen one car explode.
We had one car get so hot that the glass from the windows and the aluminum intake manifold melted and ran across the road, but no explosions.
I did see two houses explode though.
Weirdly (or perhaps not, given that electronics and water don’t play well together), most of the car fires I’ve seen have been while driving through rain; often very heavy rain.
Just over the last three or so years, on the 5 and 134 in LA, I’ve seen a full size metro bus burn, a large RV burn, a box truck, one full size pickup and several cars. Of those, only one was in dry conditions.
Even stranger, they all seem to occur next to Griffith Park (cue Twilight Zone theme).
Gas is supposed to burn slowly, so explosions really shouldn’t happen.
I drive an E-type Jaguar, and endless Hollywood B-movies from the 70s have taught me that they explode into a fireball about half a second after they are driven off the cliff by the bad guy, or suicidal protagonist (who may, or may not have leapt from the car before it sailed off the precipice depending on the likelihood of a sequel.)
As a precaution I never let “bad guys” drive my E-type Jaguar, and I banish suicidal thoughts from my brain. Besides, DRIVING the E-type Jaguar makes me happy, so even if I were suicidal I’d never make it to the cliff before i was cured by that wonderful car.
–chuck
As a former firefighter, we studied this in the academy. Cars do not explode. However, spilled gasoline can rapidly combust, causing a fireball like effect, but not a true explosion (i.e. no significant shockwave. I have even witnesses a ruptured gasoline tanker go up and I was less than 50 feet away (in full gear with a hose already charged).
For gasoline fumes to create an “explosion” they must have the right fuel air mixture to combust and be in a confined environment to create a shockwave. This sort of condition doesn’t exist with-in a vehicle’s tank.
I have seen it happen in a training film where firefighters were cutting on a large vessel with gasoline fumes inside, the air fuel mix was with in explosive limits and they produced sparks with their cutting saw…the resulting blast killed several firefighters.
mistrernee :
April 5th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
I’m suprised they don’t explode more often, especially if a car has an almost empty tank of gas.
They probably have some sort of system in place to allow fumes to escape or something… right?
Cars since the early 70s or so have a charcoal canister and hoses attached to the fuel tank to absorb the vapors and reintroduce them into the combustion process, so theoretically the vapors won’t build up in pressure in the tank. In real life, however, it doesn’t always work that way, and you can get a big whiff of fuel vapor when you open the fuel cap when the tank is near empty.
——–
I once saw a MARTA bus in Atlanta back in 1984 that caught fire and burned to the ground. Must’ve been a diesel fuel leak somewhere in the engine compartment at the rear of the bus. No one was hurt – the fire department got it out only after the bus was a total loss. No explosion though.