As luck would have it...

[TheCougar]

I was driving in Fort Worth, getting on one of those cloverleaf exits in a slight drizzle. Not driving fast, just going out to meet someone for lunch. One minute I’m fine, the next minute I’m backwards going into the ditch in the center of the cloverleaf. I came to rest 180 degrees the wrong way, wondering what the hell happened. Then I get out of my truck and look down and, this is hard to explain, but I’ll try…. In the middle of this grass cloverleaf area is a square concrete hole about 4 feet deep. The concrete is perfectly centered between my rear tires where I had gone in backwards. Meaning, there’s a tire, a concrete ledge going down 4 feet, and big ass hole, another concrete ledge, and the other tire. If I had been 8” off in either direction one of the tires would have fallen in and I would have ripped the axle clean off.

Now I’m standing there, marveling at #1 what the hell just happened and how I went from fine to backwards in 2 seconds and #2 the dumb luck of not totaling my truck. This guy who saw the whole thing pulled over and we were talking and I was watching all the other cars go around the curve. Every single RWD truck or car that went around that curve got squirrelly and started to lose the back end at the one spot and it turns out there was an oil patch right in the middle of the road and the water was making it rise up. I decided I needed to extricate my truck asap. The guy marshalled me out of there so a wheel didn’t fall into the concrete hole. No sooner had I moved my truck than a Jeep hit the oil slick and went into the concrete hole (backwards). So I got double lucky.

 

[Weldor]

If your fob runs out of batteries you can use it to press the ignition button. The car will supply its own power for inducing current in the RFID circuit of the fob and read it.

How do unlock the doors with a dead battery?

 

[SonnyDay]

I can't speak for all vehicles... but many fobs have a small key hidden inside them that can unlock the door manually. My wife's (Nissan Leaf) has a little release that lets you pull a tiny key out of where the fob attaches to a keyring.

 

[wavygravy]

My buddies and I used to make PVC potato launchers of various designs and one day decided that my dad's black powder and some metal pipe would make one hell of a spud gun... We make the launcher (let's be real, cannon), beefed it up to a 14 year olds engineering standards and added one of those 1.5 second firecracker fuses on it. Added an unknown amount of powder and headed to the woods and laid the contraption on top of a hill. I drew short straw to light it.

I long arm the lighter while my friends hide behind the nearest tree. Light it, take a step to run to the tree and slip/fall over the side of the hill and roll as fast as I could. 1.5 secs later BOOOOOM! Ears ringing, dust everywhere we ran as fast as we could back home before the cops came. We went back later to evaluate and looked at the mess, the "cartridge" we made was lodged 2" into the tree my friends were hiding behind and exactly in line with my planned running route. If I got hit there would have been no need to call an ambulance. Whether fate or just clumsy I'll never know.

Upon review, the potato ended up a fine mist and was not that effective. We upgraded it to shoot lag bolts and use longer fuses instead. We were not a smart bunch. Pretty sure it's still in my dad's garage somewhere.

 

[WoodlandCritter]

How do unlock the doors with a dead battery?

Same as what SonnyDay said for me. All my fobs have had a little removable manual key for the doors.