With luck, you’ll never be trapped in a car with the need to break the window from the inside, but if you are and don’t have the right tools, your salvation may be right behind your head. The headrest of car seats, if detachable, could be used to break open the glass of a car in case of fire and emergency. This “survival tip” has been around for several years and has been featured in a number of survival blogs suggesting that car headrests are deliberately designed to break windows during emergencies. While it is possible to break a car window with a removable headrest, this is an incidental application of that object rather than a deliberate one. Nonetheless, this safety tip could be just what you need in an emergency!
Here’s how to use your car seat’s headrest to break your car door window:
- Take your headrest off of the back of the seat.
- Push one of the pegs from the headrest attachment down into the space where your window retracts, just where the seal is.
- Jam it down in there a few inches and then pull the headrest towards you. Doing this flexes the window glass laterally and the result is a break – usually at the other end of the window. The car window safety glass will shatter and crumble, falling away from the door. (Automotive glass is built to take significant direct impact, perpendicular to the plane of the glass, but if you flex it or hit it along the edge of the glass, it’s much more fragile.)
This method will work in a pinch or in someone else’s car, but we suggest keeping an emergency hammer and seat belt cutter in the glove compartment or under the passenger seat of your own car in case of emergency too. Here are couple of good options.
Stay Safe!
