Teen Hospitalized After His Air Freshener Blew Up

When air freshener attacks. Yup, that's right --- a teenager in Germany found himself in the hospital due to a bottle of air freshener. Apparently, the stuff can do a lot more than just buy you one more passable day before having to do your laundry.

According to the Associated Press, police found the 17-year-old boy badly burned last week after his Volkswagen SVU caught fire in the German city of Duisburg. The whole predicament goes back to cigarettes --- the young man was trying to disguise the scent of cigarette smoke in his family's car, and he wound up really overdoing it with the air freshener. Did he think that an opaque fog of Febreze would really be less suspicious than the smell of cigarette smoke? But anyway, I digress.

The teenager sprayed so much air freshener that the police reported the atmosphere inside the car became a "combustible gas mixture" that was primed to explode once exposed to heat. Needless to say, a car is not the best place for this type of thing. Once the boy opened the passenger door, one of the car's automatic indoor lights turned on and set off the explosion.

The explosion blew off the Volkswagen's sunroof, and the boy was rushed to the hospital with burns on both of his arms.

This is only the latest in scary cases of explosive cars. A few months back, a father in Independence, Missouri left his two children alone in a hot car with the windows rolled nearly all the way up, to pick up his daughter from cheerleading practice, reports local outlet KSHB. While he was out of the car, his 6-year-old picked up the lighter that the man left on his seat and set the car on fire. Luckily, both children were saved before any harm came to them.

And it's not just cars that are bursting into flames. Earlier this month, a 6-year-old boy in Brooklyn was rushed to the hospital after a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone exploded in his hands. The incident occurred shortly after Samsung had announced the recall of all their Galaxy Note 7s, as a number of similar flare ups had been reported by users. Now, the phone is prohibited to be even brought aboard an airplane.

Even scarier still is the case of a teenager in Alberta, Canada from earlier this year. A 16-year-old boy suffered first- and second-degree burns after an e-cigarette exploded in his mouth, CBC News reports. The boy's face caught on fire as a result of the explosion, and it knocked out two of his teeth.

I guess the real lesson here is to be sure that you're around potentially dangerous devices. Technology has bettered our lives in so many ways, but it can still cause a whole lot of trouble if it's manufactured incorrectly or you don't know how to properly handle it.