A Series Of ‘Final Destination’ Level Coincidences Happened To Let The Sun Melt This Jeep’s Interior Like A Laser

You know what always kind of surprises me, religiously? The fact that we don’t worship the sun. Yes, I get that humans have worshiped the sun at various times in our history, from Apollo to Helios to Ra to Inti and Shamash and more, but it hasn’t really stuck, at least not in mainstream religions. We’ve generally moved on to more subtle and complex ideas of deities, but you’d think the sun would have more of a religious following. I mean, it’s there every single day – hell, it defines the day – it’s responsible for all life on the planet, and even though it’s 93 million miles away, it can still burn you. That all sounds pretty godlike to me! Oh, and if that’s not enough to convince, you, you need to see what it did to this Jeep.

This was something published on Reddit’s Mildly Infuriating subreddit, though I might argue this is a little beyond “mildly.” Honestly, it’s a pretty remarkable event that happened, one that relied on a series of events happening, each seemingly unrelated, but also compounding on one another to make the ideal and improbable circumstances for the end result, which was, in this case, essentially turning the sun into a laser that caused a massive amount of damage to the inside of the Jeep.

Here’s what happened, right from the Reddit post:

Jeep melted
by
u/jagerin_mikado in
mildlyinfuriating

Okay, wait wait wait. Let’s just go through this step by step: someone brings their Jeep Wrangler into a repair shop because their power retractable roof – I’d suspect it was one of these one-touch power retractable roof setups:

Okay, so the roof was stuck open, so the shop covered it in collision wrap, a tough plastic wrap material designed to keep car interiors dry and cover open sections of the car. All that seems reasonable. Then it rained. Water from the rain pooled on the crash wrap surface. The next day, there’s high temperatures and a lot of sun and – this is the part where it gets amazing – the shape of the volume of trapped water on the crash wrap was such that the water became, essentially, a magnifying lens, focusing the sunlight into the interior of the car in a powerful beam that did this damage:

Look at that! It’s astounding! Also, the pattern it makes is the result of the rotation of the Earth, so if you know any Flat Earth idiots, here’s more proof that they need to maybe just not talk so much anymore.

Also, it’s amazing the upper plastic didn’t melt; I guess the water-lens prevented that from happening?

What are the odds of all these things happening together to cause this? It’s bonkers! It feels like those dumb Final Destination movies where some shirtless dude trying to make fishsticks manages to burn down his apartment and die by a ladder stabbing:

Incredibly, this kind of thing isn’t unheard of in the automotive world and its continuing battle with the sun. Remember the Chrysler TC by Maserati? Sure you do. One doesn’t forget a car like that. Remember how it had that funny porthole window? That was its big trademark! Well, those windows would focus sunlight in the same way and burn the carpets in the back:

Incredible. You know what else is incredible? The fact that the Jeep we’re talking about here didn’t completely catch on fire! If you’re looking for a positive takeaway from all this, consider that: thanks to the federal FMV SS 302 (Flammability of interior materials) standard, automotive interior materials are remarkably flame retardant, which means that instead of the whole Jeep interior going up like a California forest in the middle of a drought, we just get those burned lines.

Anyway, maybe try praying to the sun every now and then? What could it hurt?

Top graphic images: Stellantis; NASA