While not a firefighter, I've some experience with dealing with this as I'm SAR crew on a lifeboat in an area where unfortunately vehicles enter the water regularly. During recovery, it would be _very_ useful to know some of this information (particularly where the curtain airbags, hydraulic dampers, and batteries are). We generally aren't going to be able to get any documentation from the vehicle, but now I know these exist, just being able to Google for them will be very helpful.
I have no experience in this field. The article wants a hard-copy behind the sun visor of each car. I would think having a digital copy could be grabbed from the VIN number with minimal coordination. In practice, it could be pulled up before rescue services arrive on the scene from the license plate or driver's registration with a final spot-check on scene. That might help the parent?
I would think a lookup via a photo (unless it's the vin number or a QR code) would be more difficult and take much longer to adopt. I would think something like having the car broadcast basic info with an emergency beacon would be more ideal...but has privacy concerns, would require opt in from manufacturers, and equipment and training on the emergency services side. Maybe another industry like planes or boats would be easier to adopt something like this?
Interestingly, in the EU, all cars sold since mid-2018 have a mandatory SIM card as part of the eCall system. In the event of a crash, it automatically connects to the driver to the local 112 emergency number, but also sends telemetry (location, direction of travel, VIN and some other details). There are definitely privacy implications to this system.
It doesn't generally help when the vehicle enters the water, because the signal attenuates so quickly in water that it's very unlikely that the modem will be able to connect to a tower.
Neat, had to reread how GP defined this "App" and it actually fits.
Although this App simply snaps the license plate and does a lookup and I think what GP meant was a "random snap of the car itself, doing some machine learning magic... But that's possibly my bias towards hn comments :)
This is actually much more helpful, although I think not every country allows for has easy access to the license-plate data for vehicle type lookup...
TBH, if no-one recognises the car, we'd just radio in the registration number and get control to do a look-up. For various reasons, we're not allowed private phones on the boat.
Different domain, but when I owned a little airplane, I took classes from a pilot-owner association about that line of aircraft.
They were still simple enough, by design, that you wanted to know as much as possible about the way it was put together.
For example: I learned that the fuel lines from the tanks in the overhead wing ran inside the door posts, what would be the "A" and "B" pillars of a passenger car.
Such details were super interesting, when I would run engine-out landing scenarios in my head during my walk to the office each morning.
This should be integrated to national vehicle databases. In emergency the firefighters could prepare by looking up the rescue sheet of the vehicle before they arrive.
At least in Finland you get a whole lot of information already by their license. As an optional addition for older vehicles, and requirement for new ones wouldn't be too onerous.
I was curious about if hybrid vehicles are more challenging, and they certainly seem to be more complex to navigate in general on the sheet, but I'm not sure how that plays out in practice. I wonder what thought goes into rescue events in the layout of the HV lines and so on?
There's a section that says "Secure vehicle to prevent it rolling." and in this vehicle it points to to electrical buttons, one capacitive button on the gear selector and another pullup switch that says it activates an electric break. What happens when the power is disconnected, do those still work if not already engaged?
I can see that my country is on the list of countries that support this, but I've never heard or seen anything in media about this.
Some year ago there was talk about using Google Glasses for such purposes. Here is one video about firefighters using Google Glasses to see car diagrams.
All these reinforced windows are more meant to take the brunt of blunt force impacts. We have tools already to puncture laminate glass and simply cut out a section of the window for patient access. Unless they start designing these things to resist sharp metal objects at high velocity and saw blades, you don't have to worry about it.
Hydraulic claws will puncture into anything, including reinforced glass IIRC.
Now for sure it could slow down a rescue operation.
The simple specialized sledgehammer for firefighters (i forgot the name) might be hard to use on this glass. Also for non firefighters, rescuing someone trapped inside might be a challenge.
