In article ,
Martin Brown writes:

The unfortunate footballer would be electrocuted when he had one foot on
the ground and a hand still touching the metal body of the car. The
others presumably didn't touch anything conductive as they got out OK.

There used to be a set of accident pictures on the web with
something not dissimilar. A car hit a reinforced concrete
pole (of the type commonly found in some other contries, but
not common in UK). The driver was not hurt, opened the door,
put a foot out, and was prompty electrocuted by the high
voltage (don't recall what voltage, but the lines were many
thousands of volts). Driver's legs ended up like a lump of
charcoal which also burned out part of the car.

You had to look carefully to see what had happened, and the
photographer had captured all the relevant evidence.
When the car hit the pole, the pole stayed upright and the
HV wires didn't come down. However, one of the wires came
off its insulator and was resting on the metal cross-arm, so
the cross-arm was now live. At the bottom of the pole, the
car had chipped off some concrete and was resting on one of
the internal metal reinforcing bars. There was obviously a
connection between the metal cross-arm and the rebar in the
concrete. This left the car sitting at many thousands of
volts, which was OK until the driver tried to step out.

It's interesting to think what you should do in a scenario
where your car body is connected to high voltage. You can't
sit there for too long as the tyre rubber conducts high
voltage well enough to slowly catch fire (find a video of
a digger or cherry picker hitting HV cables to see this).
You could jump out of the car so there's never a connection
through you between the car and ground. This then exposes
you to a secondary risk - that there's a potential across
the ground which is large enough to bring you down with your
first stride. So you need to jump out landing feet together
(as though tied), and then jump away in a similar style,
or hop, but falling over in the process could be lethal.
Anyway, well worth thinking through before it happens to
you.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]