It might surprise you, but a lot of people accidentally put something incorrect into the windshield washer fluid of their cars. Even if you suddenly run out and need to replenish it, the chances are you can find a shop or gas station selling new fluid.
Yet one mechanic has discovered, with a little bit of humor, how bad things can be if someone does put the wrong kind of fluid into the reservoir. TikTok user and mechanic Burnett (@lilmikyb) recently had to do a check on a car brought in by a customer who said the windshield fluid pump wasn’t working.
There was no hint of anything being wrong, other than the pump having failed on its own. So Burnett didn’t think he’d have a problem either fixing the pump or just giving the car in question a brand new one.
So you can imagine his shock when, after checking out the reservoir in the car, he found hand sanitizer had filled the reservoir. No, you aren’t hallucinating. Someone really had put hand sanitizer into the reservoir of their car. Filling it up with a different type of liquid is one thing, but filling it with sanitizer seems truly incredible.
How the Mechanic Discovered the Hand Sanitizer
@lilmikyb The customer poured WHAT in their washer fluid??😭 The saxophones got real loud for this washer pump😭 #automechanic #pov ♬ Unknown – FullMix – Powers Music
The customer who brought the car in simply said that the windshield fluid pump wasn’t working. To take a closer look, Burnett had to go and open up the reservoir. It was doing this that led him to discover that hand sanitizer had been poured into the reservoir. “I’m like, ‘No, I’m reading the ticket wrong,’” he said at the start of his TikTok video.
We then see a close-up of the dipstick from the car’s windshield washer container. On the stick, we can see a viscous substance, and you can hear the surprise in his voice as he takes a look at the dipstick: “It’s impossible that somebody would—” before he interrupts himself in sheer amazement. “Bro, there is hand sanitizer in this windshield washer,” he said, incredibly surprised and simply bewildered.
Naturally, the mechanic had to drain the mixture out of the vehicle. You may be wondering if this actually worked. Plenty of people in the comments section of the video were asking the same thing. The answer to that was no; it did not work. “It did not. The pump is now a fallen soldier,” replied Burnett. The sanitizer had ensured there was no way that the pump could be reused.
Others Said They Had Found Weirder Things in Cars
One person added an extra comment to the video, saying, “Not as bad as olive oil in the oil.” So while hand sanitizer in the washer fluid is clearly bad, it could have been quite a lot worse. As olive oil has a low smoke point, that could have rendered the car it was in useless for life. Another user asked why they didn’t just use the washer fluid system to empty the sanitizer from the car.
Burnett explained why that wasn’t possible. “The hand sanitizer completely fried the pump; her complaint was actually that the pump no longer worked AFTER adding the hand sanitizer,” he said. One viewer said they would simply sell the car to avoid being embarrassed by a mechanic when they found out what had gone wrong.