You know all those pesky water bottles [1] you leave floating around your car for oh, I don't know, weeks on end? Apparently, this seemingly harmless mistake can be pretty dangerous. Dioni Amuchastegui, a battery technician at the Idaho Power Company, learned this lesson first-hand when he saw smoke coming from beneath the centre console [2] of his truck while taking a lunch break.

"I looked over and noticed light was being refracted through a water bottle and starting to catch the seat on fire [3]," said Dioni in a video posted to Idaho Power's Facebook page. David Richardson, a firefighter from the Midwest City Fire Department, agreed that people should always double-check their water bottles are out of the sun before they exit their cars. "It uses the liquid and the clear material to develop a focused beam and sure enough, it can actually cause a fire, a combustion. The sunlight will come through, when it's filled with liquid, and act as a magnifying glass as you would with regular optics."

Although the risk of your car going up in flames is low, it's always better to be safe than sorry. Watch the full video to get the inside scoop on how the reaction can happen.