'Shocking' moment Prius gets struck by lightning leaves everyone wondering the same thing

A crazy video shows the exact moment a car was hit by lightning

It shows a rainy road with a car turning around slowly, and at first glance you might not see anything more than a brief flash of light.

But the shot is significantly slowed down, and you can see clearly a bolt of lightning smashing into the Toyota Prius.

Shot from a dashcam, the video was uploaded to YouTube by storm-chaser Chris Riske in April 2022 and is pretty jaw-dropping to watch.

The slow-mo video shows the Prius hit by lightning on its rear - and it looks like its back antenna was basically blown to smithereens in the process.

In the video's description, Riske called it 'an insane once-in-a-lifetime shot of a car getting struck by lightning'. And while the video might not have revealed much of the damage, he added that his friend's car 'was was immobilized, and it is still being worked on' - which sounds like the lightning managed to fry something important.

People are unsurprisingly amazed in the comments under the video, but one interesting thread comes up repeatedly, as people wonder whether this sort of power surge could ever be captured and used as a power source.

One commenter said: "Imagine if it charged his battery back to 100%", and another riffed: "Hybrid system: 'The car has been charged 300%.' Driver: 'How about that!'"

While that might seem like a far-fetched idea, the massive power of lightning strikes has inspired plenty of research to establish whether we could ever harvest energy from the sky.

@highriskchris/YouTube

Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple.

A 2022 blog post from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia dove into whether we can actually store energy from lightning.

Professor John Fletcher from the UNSW School Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications said: "The challenge of capturing energy from lightning is that while there may be a billion joules of energy, it’s mainly being used up in the lightning strike itself. The bright light and the loud thunder that humans observe is most of the energy being used up - so in some respects, it’s a little too late by the time it hits the ground."

So, any solution would need to not only catch lightning before it reaches the ground, but also be able to either predict its path or channel it in certain directions - which makes for a hurdle no one has been able to clear yet.