If you can get shocked sticking your fingers in a socket, why can’t you shock a battery back to life?
Every couple of months, a new video pops up showing one or two people jump-starting a car with just their bare hands.
In pop culture, we’ve even got famous people like American rapper Kevin Gates who confirmed in an interview with DJ Akademiks that, “he (Kevin Gates) started a car battery with his bare hands.”
As proof, Gates tempted the Gods and said, “If I didn’t, may God murder my children.”
Here’s that interview below.
Now, there’s a new video circulating showing two men holding hands, one guy has his fingers on a good car battery and the other guy has his fingers on the terminals of the dead one.
And, you guessed it, their human bodies seemingly transfer amperage through from the good to dead battery, the once dead car starting to life?
Facts or cap?
First, check out the video gone viral on TikTok below.
@uncletaj_ If your battery ever die #lifehacks #lifehack #lifehackvideo #fyp #foryoupage #cars #car #cartiktoks #cartiktok #viral #viralvideo ♬ original sound – Taj
I admit, it’s been so long since I took anything science related, let alone circuits but, thankfully we have the wisdom of the crowd to fact-check a seemingly unbelievable video.
Here’s what Blaine Henry, who goes by @BlaineHenryTFL on the bird app, has to say on the matter.
According to Henry, whether you can or can’t start a car battery with your bare hands comes down to Ohm’s law.
Ohm’s law is a well known formula used to calculate the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance in an electric circuit.
Ohm’s law states that, “voltage = current x resistance, or volts = amps x ohms, or V = A x Ω.”
Ohm’s law is fact. Period.
And, for Blaine’s claim that the human body has a resistance as low as 1,000 ohms?
It’s true.
According to a study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the human body naturally has a resistance of around 10,000 ohms but, when wet, “Wet or broken skin may drop the body’s resistance to 1,000 Ohms.”
For the purposes of starting a car battery, lower resistance is better.
According to Ohm’s law, under the “best” case scenario, if a good car battery has 12 volts, the best a human can output is .012 amps.
Henry came to the same conclusion.
To put that in perspective, .012 amps can’t even power on a single LED bulb. You need at least .1 amps to do that.
So, how many amps does it take to jump start a dead battery? In five minutes or less, not .012 amps, that’s for sure.
According to jump start specialists Lokithor,
“Your standard Toyota Corolla will need about 150 cold-cranking amps to get jumped. On the other hand, a Chevy Suburban will require around 600-800 cold-cranking amps to get started.”
And those two guys in the video were clearly not wet so, the output of amps is probably around .0012 amps
So, no, you can’t jump start a car using just your hands.
What Kevin Gates said is cap, and this video is cap, too.
Now that we know the video above isn’t what it claims, anyone who knows the slightest about cars knows that the “dead” car had plenty of cranking amps on its own. In other words, the battery wasn’t the problem, there.
Off the top of my head, it sounds like that car was suffering from fuel-related issues, i.e. dirty fuel injectors, a clogged throttle body, or a defective mass air flow sensor.
Cranking the car a lot just happened to turn it over enough to start on its own.
Do you agree with what Henry and I claim is actually the truth?
Let me know in the comments below.
