Hydrolocks are an old phenomenon with combustion-engined vehicles, but most drivers still fail to understand how it happens. That’s what makes so many try their luck crossing flooded areas without even knowing the depth of that area. A viral video shows something that seems impossible and leads us to only two possible conclusions: either Renault is building amphibian cars, or this driver was just incredibly lucky.
The footage shows a Renault Kwid trying to cross a flooded avenue. Almost immediately, it begins to float and just heads down the road until the miracle happens: the front wheels of the A-segment car touch the ground, and it just leaves the water as if nothing unusual happened. Amphibian cars do that, but not a Kwid.
The entry-level vehicle is sold in India and Brazil, where this video was shot. The Kwid is the ICE version of the Renault City K-ZE, which European buyers know as the Dacia Spring. Chinese customers have to choose what to relate it to: there are seven versions of the project with different names and appearances in the world’s largest market.
We have yet to determine if the City K-ZE floats, but the heavy battery pack at the bottom of the EV must make it difficult. The Renault Kwid pulled that off in a way we never imagined would be possible, especially considering how vulnerable its air intake must have felt in the midst of so much water.
That takes us back to hydrolock, where the engine breathes water instead of air. In living creatures, that leads to drowning, but engines are even more sensitive. The incompressible nature of liquids catastrophically clashes with the reciprocating spirit of those machines. The battle with water will lead pistons, crankshaft, head, and even the engine block to bend or break. None of that happened with the Kwid.
None of the several videos circulating right now pointed out where this happened or when. The oldest video we found (below) dates from November 30. Curiously, all of them contain the song “Dança da Cordinha,” which is about limbo. This game from the island of Trinidad defies people to pass under a rope or a bar: the winner is the person that does not touch the obstacle at its lowest possible position.
In this song, the band “É o Tchan” sings: “Vai, vai, vai passando…,” which means that someone is passing (under the rope). The video editor made a joke to show how the Kwid was passing through the flood against all odds. If you want to check the whole song, it is also embedded below.
Without any info apart from what appears in the video, we started investigating where the whole thing happened and discovered it was in Florianópolis. The city faced floods between November 30 and December 1, which makes the video below probably the original one. It belongs to a channel dedicated to cars and was shot at R&V Veículos, a used car shop. We tried to contact them to discover if they knew who shot the video. We’d love to give this person proper credit for this little marvel, apart from asking for a few more details about what happened.
One person close to who shot the video or the video maker himself states at some point that the Kwid is toast: water probably invaded the engine already. The little car seems to keep accelerating while it floats, which makes perfect sense: liquid could also invade the exhaust pipes and cut the engine, preventing it from working until it was taken out of the water.
The comments in this video and in those that went viral clearly show people have no idea what hydrolock is and think that negative comments actually come from envious people. Why would they call the driver clueless if their Kwid did so well as a temporary boat? Unless Renault states it was really conceived to do that, those frightened by the Kwid driver’s attitude are more than correct: don’t do that, folks. You may not be as lucky as this person was.
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