Driver 'blows up' car with 'excessive' use of air freshener | Hacker News Reader

Driver 'blows up' car with 'excessive' use of air freshener

bbc.com

38 pointssohkamyung41 comments

Me and my friends had a lot of fun as teenagers using aerosols for a similar purpose. We'd scavenge old aerosols from our parent's houses and use them as the propellant for spud guns and the like (we didn't blow up any cars, for the record).

I think the trick was to find the ones with propane propellant rather than butane. I also suspect that the (rapidly boiled) moisture droplets from the aerosol would have added to the explosive force too.

Eventually we decided to go straight to the source and got ourselves a little oxy/propane welding kit. That worked a treat. I'm kind of surprised B&Q sold that to a bunch a teenagers actually.

Am I the only one thinking that this was no "excessive air freshener use" but more like someone huffing flammable gasses?

The fuel:air ratio for getting high is way richer than the fuel:air ratio for combustion. Also if you're getting high off it you're probably not going to want to waste it. I'm assuming butane was the propellant for the air freshener since IIRC that's a common propellant for things that are supposed to smell nice.

https://www.mathesongas.com/pdfs/products/Lower-(LEL)-&-Uppe...

Many things hit an explosive atmosphere at around 4%.

Also, there is the concept of deflagration vs detonation, the latter being decidedly worse, but unlikely in this case due to the geometry.

There is a whole field of electrical engineering dedicated to defining potential for and avoiding of igniting explosive atmospheres in industrial plant.

Achieving the right fuel/air mixture before the lighter ignites it requires so many things to go right (or wrong) that this might be one of those things tossed around by conspiracy theorists for a long time.

Probably significantly helped by the improvement of door seals over the years.

https://go.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters-jr-on-discover...

A very strange use of scare quotes by the BBC.

The guy blew up his car with an excessive use of air freshener. "Blow up" isn't a precise technical term we need to worry about abusing. "Excessive" might be subjective or subject to debate, but when the resulting damage is enough to blow out the windows and bend the sheet metal, let's just go with excessive.

Those aren't scare quotes, they're just regular quotes. Here I assume they're taken from the police statement on the incident.

Edit to add quote in context:

> West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service said the cause of the "dramatic" incident was "excessive" air freshener use.

No, they're scare quotes. Quoting the police statement would involve... quoting the police statement (or a portion of it, or multiple portions joined by elipsis), not quoting two separate words from the police statement.

Regarding your edit: yes, they use scare quotes in the article text as well as the headline. It's stupid.

That's standard British style. Look at every BBC headline, they almost always have at least one thing in quotes.

Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for that. To be honest the BBC is probably the only British thing I read much. Am I right in assuming it's generally a bit less tabloidish than a lot of the other popular stuff?

BBC isn't a tabloid but it's also not particularly high quality either, especially the output of the BBC Worldwide service (BBC.com) which has different editorial guidelines.

Yes you are right. It is one of the few news source still trying to be as independent as possible. This despite being paid for by the Government.

I disagree. The feeling that immediately hits me when I read this headline is that they are pulling terminology from a 3rd party and using quotes to in fact lessen the scare-factor of the terminology. To me, this headline says, "here's how this incident is officially described, not just some stuff we're making up to be dramatic - please read the article to get the details, because the terminology is not necessarily objective." This feels responsible to me, rather than fear-mongering. I think your approach may be a little tainted by the common cynical outlook many people share regarding the entirety of the concept of news.

> I think your approach may be a little tainted by the common cynical outlook many people share regarding the entirety of the concept of news.

Regarding my outlook towards the news, nothing could be further from the truth.

> To me, this headline says, "here's how this incident is officially described, not just some stuff we're making up to be dramatic - please read the article to get the details, because the terminology is not necessarily objective."

That's part of the problem with scare quotes. You're not trusting the reader. (in this case, the reader should be trusted to know that "blows up" and "excessive" are, well, as I described them above. One would hope they also trust you to not make stuff up, but if not, you're not going to fix that with some quotes.)

The term "scare quotes" is not synonymous with "scary quotes" - it refers to quotation marks added in order to distance the author from the source of the words, exactly as you describe.

Those aren't scare quotes.

They're quote quotes.

The BBC follows a journalistic style guide that requires the use of quotes when directly quoting someone else when the attribution is not clear.

That makes it easier to determine, when reading an article, if the substance of an article is based on a journalist's own research and observations or those of another.

It is actually the right way to do things.

BBC News style guide: https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/articles/art201307021121335...

It's a silly thing to go on and on about, but the quotation examples used in the style guide you linked to are quite different than what we're talking about here.

This happened a few years ago in Germany with deodorant: https://www.welt.de/regionales/nrw/article134335255/Auto-exp...

From the pics, they must've been quite violent explosions...

On a related note, a lot of folks feel air fresheners actually make the air fresh. Don't they usually just hide the smell?

Easy brain hack. Name your thing what you want people to think it does.

Totally, the reality is : smell is masked and air is full of chemical components harmful to your health [0]. Our olfactory receptors are there to protect us. It should be noted that persons with bad perception of odors are closer to their end [1]. At least, use some natural products which may be dangerous, but for those, our body has had generations of evolution to tolerate those.

There is nothing like odour destruction. It's just tricking the nose into believing that another scent is around. Odours add in bizarre ways. If something smells bad, 1) open the window and 2) solve the root cause.

[0] https://www.considerable.com/home/cleaning-organizing/are-ai... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3561743/

Hiding a smell is air freshening. If you're thinking of purifying, that's a separate thing.

No, replacing foul air with fresh outside air is air freshening.

The parent is talking about a literal air freshener, not removing and replacing air.

Correct.

Unless they're based on whatever chemical combination makes Febreeze work, in which case it does actually eliminate odor. There's a fascinating story behind the invention of Febreeze.

"The use of cyclodextrin as a sprayable odor absorber was patented by Procter & Gamble until November 24, 2019."

Interesting note on the patent from Wikipedia.

Why would you use an air freshener if you're gonna smoke in it anyway?

Smokers tend to not notice the smell of smoke since they are constantly around it/smell of it themselves.

Seems to happen pretty regularly! The “More on this story” links below the article list two other similar incidents, in November 2019 and September 2017.

I personally find this story a little hard to believe.

Anyone able to explain this in a bit more detail?

Naively, I wonder if the driver may have had other flammable substances present?

A quick spray in a potato cannon has the explosive energy to propel a potato, it’s not unreasonable to think a the entire can can blow up a car.

https://youtu.be/fioP8cflUIA Hairspray can in bonfire

Yea but the volume of the inside of a car is quite a bit larger than the chamber of a potato cannon. It’ll take much more to create enough pressure.

And the attendants to this incident list "excessive" use as a cause.

You're only look at about a 4% mixture to get there. It is entirely within the realm of possibility.

Excessive air freshener use can’t be healthy even if it doesn’t “blow up”. Inhaling all that propellant and volatile compounds.

How much pressure are we talking here to blow a windscreen? Enough to rupture an eardrum?

I wonder what really happened that he came up with that story to tell the cops? I'm not sure I'm going to believe this story until we have Adam Savage show it's possible.

Adam Savage already blew stuff up with spray sunscreen (for the same reason—propane as a propellant). The hard part is getting the stoichiometry right so it explodes instead of just burning.

If you contantly have source of ignition and add fuel, there will be a time when mix is just above sustaining near ignition source and more rich elsewhere. It doesn't take that much pressure to blow out windows in a car, it doesn't need to be properly mixed at right ratio in whole volume of car. It doesn't even need to be explosion, but very fast burning will increase pressure enough to blow out windows.

Vaporized fuel + air explosions is essentially what occurs in the cylinders of a gasoline engine of an automobile; there's nothing mysterious about this.

Never experimented with potato cannonry?

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