If you didn’t already know this, the “WD” in WD-40 stands for “water displacement.” And, although it may have said engines on the bottle, it’s because it’s a penetrating oil, which is used to unfreeze parts that have become stuck. Oil that goes in a car’s engine needs to be able to withstand high temperatures, which WD-40 cannot. Does that mean it was the oil’s fault that the car exploded? Maybe.
It’s also possible that the reason it burst into flames is because they left it running with the pedal pushed all the way down. “It would have exploded under that abuse with any oil,” one person wrote in a comment under the video.
Orion’s Belt
The YouTuber, a teen named Orion Dajnowicz, informed viewers that all they had to do was comment on the video for a chance to win the car. Dajnowicz was offering up a Mazda RX 7, and his subscribers couldn’t wait to hear the announcement. Winning that car was bound to change someone’s life.
The YouTuber has built up quite a following on his channel, “Life OD,” and currently has 770,000 subs. One look through the content will show you that using WD-40 as engine oil is far from being the only stunt like this that he’s pulled.
Smoke and Rear-View Mirrors
You don’t get to have nearly 800,000 subscribers with so many views by putting out boring videos, that’s for sure. For many teens, it’s hard to resist the kind of content Orion puts out. But when you’re an influencer, there are always naysayers and people who will pick your videos apart and try to correct you.
In this case, however, the naysayers in the comment’s section of his YouTube channel had a fair point. Orion believed it was the WD-40 experiment that ultimately failed and led to the demise of the vehicle. Commenters, however, had a different take on things. Some said that the different oil had nothing to do with what happened and that it was simply putting the metal pipe on the pedal and leaving it that caused the overheating and explosions. But who was right?
Stops Squeaks
When the teens read the cans of the WD-40 in the store earlier, they saw exactly what it was able to be used for. Among the items listed were “frees sticky mechanisms” and “loosens rusted parts.” But they must have imagined the part that said, “can be used in car engines.”
While many commenters just picked apart the video, there were others that were genuinely upset about the whole thing. They made it clear that they weren’t happy they could have been killed on the road if they’d been driving by when it had all happened.
Left Wondering
Orion was confused when he received the backlash for the video. He thought for sure that his followers were going to love it. But after he saw all of the negative comments pouring in, it really made him think about everything a bit more. Could it really have been just the metal pipe? Does that mean that the WD-40 had very little to do with how all of this turned out?
At that point, he started to feel some regret about his decision to film the video in the first place. In fact, he even said in another video that he did, but that he was still glad he got to be a part of it. Of course he would say that. What teenage boy doesn’t want to be a part of an exploding car experiment?