The advice has circulated in safety articles, on social media, and in well-meaning emails forwarded among people for years. If your car goes into the water, pull out the headrest, jam the metal posts into the side window, and shatter the glass. The headrest is a built-in escape tool. Every car has one. Every driver carries one. Problem solved.
Excerpted from You’re Doing It Wrong
Having commanded a Maritime Operations Special Forces A-Team, I graduated from the Royal Danish Navy Fromandkorpset Combat Swim School. One of the tasks we had to accomplish was to tie three knots around a piece of pipe while completely submerged while holding our breath (we were swimmers, not scuba). Not easy. I’ve also removed the headrests in various vehicles for cleaning or reconfiguring my Jeep— it’s a pain. I imagine doing that while underwater, trapped inside a vehicle, using my experience and ruling it out unless it’s the last, last, last option.
If you’ve never removed your headrest, try it. Then imagine doing it underwater.
The headrest method is unreliable to the point of being dangerous, and the danger is precisely that it gives people confidence in a tool that probably won’t work when they need it. And thus they don’t prepare properly.
First, do not try to break out the front windshield. It is stronger than the side. Side windows in modern vehicles are tempered glass — engineered to shatter into small, blunt pieces under impact and by design easier to defeat than the laminated windshield in front of you. Tempered glass has a specific vulnerability: a sharp, concentrated point will shatter it almost instantly. A spring-loaded center punch or a dedicated automotive escape tool — Resqme, LifeHammer, and similar designs available for under fifteen dollars — defeats a side window in one strike with minimal force.
I have this device listed on my web site at https://www.bobmayer.com/survival-and-preparation-gear/
Headrest posts are not sharp. They are blunt metal rods, generally rounded or squared off at the ends. Striking a window with a blunt object requires far more force than striking it with a sharp point — and the leverage available to a person seated in a sinking vehicle, working underwater or in waist-deep water, against a window that flexes with the strike, is not the leverage required. MythBusters tested the headrest method and could not break a window with it. Independent water-rescue instructors have produced the same result. The claim that the posts can be used as window-breakers does not survive the test. Yet some of the posts on social media about escaping still persist in this advice.
The deeper problem is that the headrest myth competes with what actually saves lives in vehicle submersion: time. Dr. Gordon Giesbrecht of the University of Manitoba, who has done rigorous research on this scenario, teaches a protocol called “Seatbelts, Windows, Out.” SWOC protocol: Seatbelts off, Windows open, Out, Children released first. A sinking vehicle may float for up to 3 minutes, but you only have about 1 minute to exit safely.
The window must come down or come out within the first thirty to sixty seconds, while the car is still floating. Power windows typically work for that brief period, even partially submerged. Lower the window, get out. If the window won’t open, break it — with the right tool.
Do not grab for your cell phone or try to call for help. It won’t arrive in the 60 seconds you have.
The other widely taught advice — wait for the cabin to fill so the water pressure equalizes, then open the door — kills people. By the time pressure equalizes, the occupants are usually incapacitated by the cold-water gasp reflex, oxygen deprivation, or panic. The door-opens-when-pressures-match physics is correct. The assumption that the occupants will still be capable of executing the maneuver is not.
Mythbusters actually has a video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC68mflUEwc
Carry an actual escape tool. Clip it to the visor or attach it to the keychain. Practice locating it without looking. The headrest is not the backup plan. The headrest is the story you tell yourself instead of buying the tool that works.
Something to remember. I’ve seen people post what they think are funny memes of signs that read “Road Ends In Water” referring to boat ramps. But a large percentage of cars that end up in the water drive right into the water on boat ramps mistaken for roads. Especially at night. You turn off into a large parking area and see what you think is a road and it’s actually the ramp. We recently had a sheriff’s deputy do that; with a handcuffed suspect locked in the back. So pay attention!
