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In February 2016 social media users began sharing videos and articles displaying an interesting (but not new) claim, holding that motorists could unlock their car doors using just a tennis ball: A typical text version explained how the tennis ball car door hack supposedly worked: An immediate red flag of nonsense was apparent if readers clicked through to view the embedded video on YouTube, which was prefaced with the clause that the advice was intended for innocent women only: The video showed a vehicle being locked with a key fob before advising female viewers on how to make a magic tennis ball for lost keys. The clip instructed women to keep the ball in their purses at all times (instead of just an extra set of keys) and explained how the hack purportedly worked: Given that this clip was circulating as early as 2007, its claims rendered the entire prospect of locking one's vehicle moot. If unlocking any car were as simple as making the equivalent of a universal master key by burning a hole in a tennis ball, unscrupulous thieves needed only to invest in a can of tennis balls to break in to any and all cars at their leisure. Yet in the years since 2007, car break-ins haven't hugely increased. Subsequent versions of this hack focused on the crime warning aspect to a small degree, such as one published to the unreliable web site iLyke that bizarrely oscillated between valuable life hack and breathless safety warning in a post that both effusively recommended and warned against the purportedly useful tennis ball hack: The rumor's perennial popularity (despite its falseness) has likely hinged on the number of users who pass it along just in case or to be better safe than sorry without ever having tried it themselves (much like a similar car door lock hack of equally dubious merit has circulated widely for roughly the same reasons). In 2007 this rumor made it to the attention of Discovery Channel's MythBusters, who addressed it in a brief web video titled Tennis Ball Car Unlock MiniMyth. In that clip, the team attempted to replicate the results based on the air pressure explanation proffered in the video. When the tennis ball method predictably failed, they attempted to unlock a vehicle using much higher air pressure applied in the same fashion, but even that approach proved insufficient for opening a locked vehicle: https://go.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/tennis-ball-car-unlock-minimyth/
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