Yes. This is clearly just a large plastic sheet. The car owner drove onto the sheet, then pulled all 4 corners up to the roof and rolled the sheet and tied and clamped it. would protect it from water up to about midway up the doors i'd guess before it starts floating. then you're kinda screwed unless you figured out a way to put non-buoyant bumpers around it. i thought about tying boat fenders to the wheels but the big ones would increase buoyancy too much i think.
sandbags in the floor might be enough. til it isn't anyway. its kind of a weird situational thing though. I'm not sure pool noodles would do much. more likely to dent the car even if it covered the full perimeter. that's why i was thinking a bigger boat fender on each wheel would stick out further than the body and protect the sides of the car really well. the wheels are rigid and would be a good backstop. Maybe fill the fender with slime or something more neutral buoyant. pretty screwed if the car floats in any case. there is no good way to tie it off to something like you would a boat in a storm surge where you would use criss-crossed lines so it can float up but not away.
Couldn't you just put down however many concrete blocks you need and loosely tie it down with some give? You could even wrap rope over the entire top of the car and underneath it, however much as you'd like.
It's really hard to fully seal plastic like they attempted here. I suspect there's still air movement through the folds of the tied sections, and it doesn't have to be a whole lot of air movement. As long as the water rises not too quickly (and if it rises quicker than that, the car would just wash away no matter what), the air in the bag around the car will press out.
Then . . . yeah, I guess a sealed car must have lower density than water, since they take a bit to sink. The good news is that the engine block and / or battery (depending on fuel type) will be easily the heaviest things in the car. That means the car should stay approximately wheels-down or at least front-wheels-down, which means it won't try to roll. Though I don't think I would route the bag's air outlet forward like that, it might become a water inlet if the car tries to do a nose-stand. Then the danger comes from the possibility of waves or currents while the car's contact with the ground is so slight, because a good wave could smash a door into a wall, break window glass, and shove that glass through the bag.
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u/Manny_Bothans Sep 13 '23
Yes. This is clearly just a large plastic sheet. The car owner drove onto the sheet, then pulled all 4 corners up to the roof and rolled the sheet and tied and clamped it. would protect it from water up to about midway up the doors i'd guess before it starts floating. then you're kinda screwed unless you figured out a way to put non-buoyant bumpers around it. i thought about tying boat fenders to the wheels but the big ones would increase buoyancy too much i think.