Lightning nearly strikes a car

boing
21

Ha! Maybe that’s not the best place to stop driving…

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I think this might be fake? The frame where the lightning appears looks very much like an after effects preset, and it’s blending weirdly with it’s background. Also, shouldn’t some artifacts appear, if the camera was digital?

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Not sure about Bradshaw, but there’s a branch of ‘Adairs’ on the right, if I could be bothered to hunt through Google streetview then location could be determined…

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Yes there should be some artifacting due to EMP. Depending on if the thing has an autofocus, arcing interference tends to screw with autofocus. Don’t know why it happens other than to just point at the RFI, but I don’t know how RFI interferes with the mechanism itself.

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so thats where potholes come from

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What makes me think it’s fake, is that the trees, poles and other cars would have lit up much brighter.
But, if you freeze frame it right where it’s at it’s brightest, you can see that rather than a flash of bright light being introduced into the scene, it’s just being digitally brightened across the board.

I’m not a believer…

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It’s shot on the corner of Nepean Highway and White Street / Como Parade East, facing northbound on Neapean Highway, between Mordialloc and Parkdale in southeast Melbourne.

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Agreed. Also, details like light poles and trees would be much brighter on the side facing the flash than on the opposite site. In the image everything’s just uniformly brighter.

And anyone familiar with digital camera auto-exposure can verify the fact it takes a couple of moments to adjust for changing light conditions; a near-instant, superbright flash would probably make the whole image overexpose into pure white (and maybe some black sun-style sensor overload artifacts) for a few frames before it had time to adjust.

Alternative reply, in meme form:

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Pretty sure it’s the corner of White St and Nepean Highway, looking north towards Mentone, Melbourne.

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Driving South on the interstate from Gainesville Florida years ago in my Volkswagen Thing with the top down, I was watching a thunderhead some distance away, wondering if I should put the top up. Suddenly, I felt a tingle and there was a blinding flash. The car just died. I looked at the motor and noticed that the insulation was burned off all the wiring. Found out later that every wire in the whole car was fried!

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I wonder if this car stopped immediately because the vehicle’s electronics/electrics were fried, or did the driver think the back of the car had just exploded?

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dammmmmmn! that’s some Twilight Zone shit right there.

no thunderclap, though?

also, cool car.

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Hmm I alway assumed Nepean was a first nations word that ended up as the name of a city in Ontario but seeing there is a Nepean Highway in Australia i had to look it up:

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Lightning likes things that are:

  • pointy
  • metal (conductive)
  • tall
  • grounded
    like the power lines and towers on both sides of the street. I’ve never heard of lightning missing such things and striking flat ground amidst such.
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Its the widest, straightest and flattest highway in Melbourne because it follows Port Philip bay to the south and is on land which would originally have been mangroves and dunes. If lightening is going to strike, it can happen virtually anywhere in that area.

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Lightening wants a good path to ground. It is possible that buried cables or pipes provided that preferred path.

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39

Maybe the occupants filmed the storm with their cellphones. Vertically.

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The same thing happened to me and my wife while driving on I-75 near Macon, Ga a few years ago when a thunderstorm brewed up. We were going 70 miles an hour, a blinding flash, almost simultaneously a HUGE thunderclap, and the truck engine died and we managed to stagger/coast to a stop off the highway.

One tire went flat, which I changed. The truck restarted but the radio no longer worked and we made it about 80 miles before the engine died and we discovered that the alternator was fried and we had been driving on the battery until it ran out of juice. Into the shop for a new alternator and battery and radio, but we had no other fried wiring. Oh, and the steel belted tire I removed was destroyed. I assume the charge went through it.

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