An elderly couple almost died after spending 13 hours locked inside their own car because they couldn’t figure out how to unlock it.
Mollianne, 65 and Brian Smith panicked and became ‘trapped’ in their new Mazda 3 hatchback after they had left their wireless key fob outside the car. The couple did not realise it was possible to unlock the vehicle without the key while sat inside.
According to the Otago Times, the couple were discovered at 7:45AM the following morning by a neighbour, at which point Mollieanne was unconscious and her husband was having serious breathing difficulties. Health workers later told the couple that they would have been killed had they spent another half hour inside the vehicle.
Reports claim Brian had looked methodically for a way out of the car, and had even resorted to trying to breaking the window with a car jack, to no avail.
“Once I found out how simple it was to unlock it I kicked myself that I did not find the way out… I had this mind-set that I did not have the transponder [so I could not get out],” Brian told the Times.
Surprisingly, the couple has since heard from five other car owners who have had similar experiences. The debacle has lead to the Mazda dealership who supplied the car vowing to provide more technical information on essential systems to elderly customers.
The story is eerily reminiscent of that involving a 67-year-old woman who blindly followed her sat-nav for 900 miles through six countries after entering the wrong destination.
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