Honestly I don't think you're going to poison yourself drinking a .5 liter plastic bottle of water thats been in your car during an AZ summer. I live here to and always keep bottles in my vehicles. It sucks drinking hot water but better than no water.

Yep, but their point was to kill the microbes with UV, not heat. As I understand it is sustained heat and a closed plastic container that gets the leaching chemicals to a level that you can taste. Also, if you are using plastic to make relatively dirty water safe, the least of your worries is a slight leaching of plastic in the short time it sits in the bottle exposed to ambient ultraviolet. OTOH if you have Arrowhead bottled water sitting in your trunk all summer, at the end of August it won't taste as good as when fresh. It's all relative.

I'm thinking a Brita filter used on either after sitting in the bottle could improve the taste.

Yes, but I wish he wouldn't use those esoteric learned terms full of acronyms (crock of BS? - braised salmon?)

I love braised salmon . . good stuff. Sure, the water will be palatable, but it can still be made to taste better.

That said, while I do leave water in the truck, it's in the truck bed under a white bed cover, so it doesn't have the benefit of that greenhouse effect you get with a car.

For what its worth, my main water store in the truck is a 20 liter no name plastic jerry can.

I believe that the plastic water bottle, along with plastic food can linings will be ushered out soon. Although a survival situation presents some unique challenges and choices, for EDC of water we have switched to stainless steel bottles.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/28/water-bottles-health.html

I can't drink most bottled water, the kind in disposable bottles, I can taste the plastic. So knowing I can taste it I kind of believe that plastic is not good for you to drink from since there is something coming off in it.

If you can taste "something" in the water after letting the bottle sit in your car, then it's logical to conclude that "something" that wasn't originally in the water is leaching from the plastic. With #1 PET bottles, the main suspect, from what I have read in the past, is phtalates, although that may or may not be what is imparting any taste to the water.

Most plastics that bottled water come in are not as durable as I would like. The soft, milky LDPE plastic jugs are notorious for springing leaks while being stored in a car. I haven't yet had a PET bottle leak yet, but unless it was a thicker-walled PET container and not the thin, crunchy kind of bottle, I wouldn't really consider storing them in a hot car for months at a time.

Probably not as good for you as it might be. For relative context consider the water our ancestors drank. I've drank water out of a ditch and used a tube to pull it up from a crack in rocks and our ancestors did much the same thing.

Absolutely pure and absolutely safe would be great but I don't typically drink much bottled water so drinking a few liters of less than absolutely healthful water isn't a big deal. Simple fact is that health effects of drinking bottled water, even in the worse case, is so small that they need to concentrate the suspected chemicals and limit test animals to only drinking this mix to show any consistent effect.

Drinking a few gallons of bottled water during an emergency doesn't phase me. It also has to be pointed out that while PET bottles do leach tiny amounts of contaminates, if you buy bottle water in polyethylene containers, typically the larger one gallon and up milky looking containers, your exposure is essentially zero for the materials of concern.

I should have mentioned that I wasn't talking about tasting the plastic in bottled water that had sat in a car for months,I can taste it in a bottle of water straight off the shelf. So this tells me that the plastic is leeching something.