Man ‘Trapped’ In Car For 14 Hours Right Next To A Manual Door Release
Picture the scene: you unlock your Cadillac XLR roadster with the intention of taking it for a spin on a glorious summer’s day. You unlock it, get in, shut the door and… oh, all the electrics have failed.
The car is electrically dead. The key fob seems to be as well. That’s a mighty slice of bad luck you’re having, says the car; better keep you in here for your own protection.
The XLR’s electric doors refused to open for Peter Pyros, leaving him trapped inside a car on a warm day in Cleveland, Ohio. It was some 14 hours later, after the poor old gent had presumably ruined his seats as well as passing out from the heat, that a neighbour found him and called the fire brigade, who jump-started the car and removed Mr Pyros.
However, car makers tend not to make doors without mechanical fail-safes to prevent exactly this sort of thing from happening. The Corvette-based XLR has a fairly visible lever down by the side of the driver’s seat, complete with a picture of an open door on it. Had Mr Pyros looked down, he’d have seen it.
The owner’s manual, in which the manual escape lever is described, wasn’t in the car. Mr Pyros is lucky to be alive; a man and his dog both died in 2015 when the same electrical failure blighted a 2007 Corvette in Port Arthur, Texas.
Now Mr Pyros says he wants to sue General Motors over his undoubtedly unpleasant ordeal. If we’re honest, we don’t rate his chances of success. Let this be a lesson to us all: it’s always worth reading the manual. You never know what sort of unexpectedly useful nuggets you’ll pick up.
Sources: Washington Post, USA Today
Comments
If he wins his lawsuit then im suing natural selection for failing us.
probably the best comment ever to be posted on CT
👏
its a white Cadillac owner
what else do you expect?
Sueing the compagny because you are dumb seems to be a nice thing
Welcome to The USA
So he wants to sue GM for his own stupidity? I don’t like GM either, but come on, that’s just ridiculous.
i love GM. they’ll send you a chassis in a box
What we all need in our lives is some doug demuro curiousity. If the old fella looked at every nook and cranny of the car looking for quirks and features maybe he would have got out sooner
True, could have even looked in the manual.
..but, yeah, this is America we’re talking about.
add doug demuro to school education??
bill passes immediately
why do Americans sue literally any one over stupid things even if its their not their fault? eg that woman that spilt her coffee on herself and then sued maccas or this guy.
Because despite being a stupid lawsuit, they somehow won. So people look at them as a way to get easy money.
I’ll have to agree with you that in the U.S. people sue more than often because they lack common sense (e.g. don’t put your cat in the microwave….). But your example with the McDonald’s coffee case is way different than common perception says it is. Things like the coffee was way to hot leading to her getting seccond degree burns. There is quite a lot more to it than a women just spilling her coffee out of stupidity and then sue Macdonalds
The woman who spilled the coffee had every right to sue McDonald’s, as the coffee was dangerously hot and caused her third degree burns around her pelvic area
All she actually wanted from McDonald’s was for them to help pay her medical bills from injuries that wouldn’t have happened if McDonald’s hadn’t served her coffee at temperatures high enough to cause third degree burns
In America there are many lawyers who are advertising that you should sue over every inconvenience you stumble upon.
And cases like the hot coffee or the woman which sued a cigarette company because her husband died of lung cancer and won make people hope that they get rich by that.
Why did such a cool car have to ruined by a stupid old man?
He looks exactly like the kind of guy who would own a Cadillac XLR.
Did he ever read the car’s manual?
I know it’s hard for us to believe, but most people don’t enjoy going through their car’s owner’s manual.
And for you Europeans struggling to understand our litigious society in the States - we increasingly don’t believe in personal responsibility here. That’s why we have signs and stickers on everything. I’m surprised nobody has proposed a railing around the Grand Canyon.
“We don’t enjoy reading the owmers manual”
You are trapped in a car for 13 hours. I’d watch a documentary on makeup just because I would be bored.
Back in the day, when we didn’t have smartphones and so many dumb people, we would read labels off of cleaning products or read ANYTHING while we would go about our business in the toilet.
Maybe people should drop their smartphones and read their owners manual every once in a while instead…
Of course he’s from my wonderful home state of Ohio 😒