Rubber Check

It has been a common misconception that the rubber in our cars tires protects us from lightening strikes. Although we all may think that this statement is true, we have no evidence or knowledge about the subject to have reason to believe it. When analyzing the claim we can easily see that it breaks many principles of scientific thinking. The first principle that the claim breaks is ruling out rival hypotheses. When hearing that we are safer in the car than outside during a storm, we automatically believe it is because of the rubber in our tires. But have we ever considered other possibilities of why we are safe in our cars? It turns out that we are safer in our cars, but not because of our tires. We are safe because of the closed metallic composition of the car. This allows the electricity to be channeled into the ground.
Other principles of scientific thinking that are broken through this claim are both replicability and falsifiability. Because lightening is an occurrence of nature we cannot just set up an experiment inside a laboratory to test this hypothesis. Although we could send electrical shocks into the car, we could not fully replicate a lightening strike. The only way to test this would to be luckily (or unluckily) struck by lightening while in your car. If this were to happen it would lead us to another broken principle of scientific thinking; correlation isn't causation. If you were to be struck by lightening while in your car and survived, you could not prove that it was the tires that saved you. A lot of other possibilities could be the reason for survival, such as: the strength of the lightening, the position at which you were hit, and other materials in the car that could have saved you. We are to eager to accept anything that we hear in the news, without considering it using scientific thinking. If we all were to analyze this situation before believing it, everyone would know it is a misconception, not the truth.

http://www.snopes.com/science/tires.asp