Richard Hammond struck by lightning in car - Top Gear - BBC
Why Physics Stack Exchange recommends it
Physics Stack Exchange users link it as a real demonstration that a car acts like a Faraday cage and protects its occupants from lightning.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2016 to 2018.
What it is
A 2007 Top Gear segment in which Richard Hammond sits inside a car in Germany while it is struck by artificial lightning in a high-voltage laboratory. It demonstrates that the metal car body carries the current around the occupant, who is unharmed.
What people said
Cites Farcher · 2016-09 · Physics Stack Exchange · on “Will I get shocked if I, being in a metal cube, touch the surface of the cube and lightning strikes the cube?”
I think this is an experiment that you should not be trying. The National Lightning Safety Institute [LINK] have issued the following statement: Reported incidents and related injuries make it clear that a person inside a fully enclosed metal vehicle must not be touching metallic objects referenced to the outside of the car. Door and window handles, radio dials, CB microphones, gear shifts, steering wheels, and other inside-to-outside metal objects should be left alone during close-in lightning events. We suggest pulling off to the side of the road in a safe manner, turning on the emergency blinkers, turning off the engine, putting one's hands in one's lap, and waiting out the storm. So alth
Cites psitae · 2016-11 · Physics Stack Exchange · on “Are cars really Faraday cages: An anomalous observation”
Background: A Faraday cage [LINK] is essentially an enclosure of a conducting material. According to electrodynamics, signals cannot pass into or out of this enclosure, because when a signal approaches the cage, in causes charges in the conducting material to accelerate, which creates a signal that cancels out the original signal. Faraday cages have other interesting properties besides canceling out electromagnetic radiation. An entertaining example was investigated by the BBC, found here [this video] , where we learn that cars can effectively shield people inside from lightning strikes. It seems not matter that a car isn't a perfect Faraday cage, what with all the windows and potentially open do
Cites anna v · 2018-06 · Physics Stack Exchange · on “Car hit by a lightning strike”
If a container has a conducting surface it forms a Faraday cage. [LINK] . There is a related answer here. [LINK] A car, if it is not plastic, is a metalic enclosure on rubber wheels. To be struck by lightning, ionizations paths between the charges on the ground and the opposite in the clouds form , and current flows discharging the energy. See this video of a car hit by lightning [this video] . Obviously the energy was not discharged inside the car, which as a Faraday cage did not offer inside the least resistance path for the current to flow to the ground. So, in a conductor, if I bring (for example) a positive charge q outside the conductor, induced negative charge will appear at its surface, y