Some of these cases may be down to user error, since most Teslas come with manual release levers.
“Teslas have a massive design flaw that doesn’t make opening the fucking doors obvious like it has been for 100 years”
Your car is on fire. The battery is burning so you have no fonctioning doors.
In the panic of your flesh getting pretty hot, you gotta remember “use the manual release lever”.
Yeah, no fucking shit that it happens.
Not to mention you might be a passenger and have no idea about any of this in the first place
In the panic of your flesh getting pretty hot, you gotta remember “use the manual release lever”.
If you’re in the front seat.
If you’re in the back seat you:
- Hope your model Y is equipped with a manual lever.
- Assuming you are still alive (see (1)) - Remove the mat from the bottom of the rear door pocket.
- Press the red tab to remove the access door.
- Pull the mechanical release cable forward.
I hope your kids and passengers paid attention to the training video you had them watch.
It actually depends on the model, it may be under the seat, behind the speaker, in the door pocket. It’s insane.
Yikes! That’s a service latch, not an emergency release.
Yeah - and as somebody reminded me in another thread it’s because you can damage the window by using it.
It’s such a well-designed car.
if the car is burning in a fire I think window damage isn’t my biggest concern lol
The reason it’s “hidden” is to prevent it from being used when the car is NOT on fire.
It’s a well-designed car.
This is the whole reason we have strict building codes for door hardware. Locks have to be able to open in a single action, and room with a larger occupancy have to have panic devices that can open the door just from falling on them. The panic devices were invented after a major theater fire killed a bunch of people thanks to their stupidly-designed fancy locks that nobody could figure out how to open during the panic.
Anyone who owns a car should install a life hammer. Doesn’t matter if it’s a Tesla or an old clunker.
This is something that can be addressed with owners, but what about passengers? Should they be carrying one around?
How 'bout Tesla just makes fucking mechanical door handles again?
Teslas were never meant to be functioning vehicles. The whole point is the cool factor, them being “drivable” is an afterthought.
Every Tesla has an emergency mechanical door handle. On some models, the rear passenger doors do not.
Some cars use laminated glass side windows that can’t be broken by those tools.
That was helpful. Thanks for sharing that story.
On a Tesla, it seems like explosive bolts would be the way to go.
Seat headrests can be pulled out and the metal guides used in a pinch.
Not on a Tesla, fixed headrests on 3 and Y.
Alarming, and I’ve just watched a video about how to get out of mine in an emergency.
However, presumably this predicament could apply to many/most modern cars which rely on electrics/software more than ever, and isn’t particular to Teslas?
You should not have to watch a video or read a manual to open a freaking car door. The fuck are people supposed to do who don’t even own the car?
You should not have to watch a video or read a manual to open a freaking car door.
👆 That right there.
The fuck are people supposed to do who don’t even own the car?
👆👆 And that even more so.
We have literally centuries of knowledge of human-machine interaction. We know what works and what doesn’t. We know the importance of getting this right from watching what would be a literal lake of blood if put into one location before us. And one of those things that works is making sure the emergency tools are very obvious and in our faces. The rear door instructions for the Model Y alone are a horror show for anybody who has ever been in a crisis before. And then on top of that not all Model Ys have such a latch anyway.
Everything about Tesla’s doors are horrific.
The fuck are people supposed to do who don’t even own the car?
Their failure on this point is particularly concerning if they want to run a robotaxi service.
Be confused as hell when the Uber driver doesn’t speak English.
Or be me, someone who noticed the weird ass flat handles on the picture and googled how to open the door during the 11 minutes it took for the driver to arrive.
So you sit up front in an Uber?
I do. It’s quite normal in Australia. We don’t live in a dystopian hellhole.
You are Murdoch’s home turf.
After he has destroyed the rest of the English speaking world he will turn on his native land as a coup de grace.
No? The back doors have the weird handles as well.
Could apply, but doesn’t apply, as the door handle is a functioning door handle in most cars.
I consider the electronic door handles to be a violation of functional safety ISO 26262. I would think that in a fire situation the doors electronics are pretty unlikely to work. The manual release is not a good control because a reasonable person isn’t necessarily going to know it exists. I work in the automotive industry and most organisations I have worked with are big old manufacturers and they think extremely long and hard about this kind of thing. Sadly I doubt Tesla cares so much about ISO standards.
If electronic doors are a must, they should fail open in an emergency…
And thus should require backup batteries isolated from the main power bus of the vehicle, which would be so cost prohibitive the entire idea is made redundant.
Uhhh…no? There’s plenty of stuff that fails open with no battery backup. It’s called fail safe. When power fails and the door remains locked is called fail secure.
The problem is that if it was fail open, any Tesla left standing around long enough for the battery to drain would unlock.
The door needs to be mechanical. Everyone else is mechanical with a sensor to auto lower the window on frameless car door windows.
Tesla did the cost analysis and decided the lawsuits from a few deaths were less than the profit to be made by not making safe doors.
Ah! I kept wondering how the fuck opening the door can damage the window. The doors don’t have window frames. That has always been a shitty design.
Other cars don’t have window frames. Only Tesla does it badly.
Tesla did the cost analysis and decided the lawsuits from a few deaths were less than the profit to be made by not making safe doors.
I think it’s much worse than that - I think it’s just because they (well, Musk) thought it would be “cool” to have everything automatic and just ignored or pushed aside any safety arguments.
Not defending the decision. I think it’s bad design.
That said, supposedly the reason is that the doorframes do not run along the top of the window, allegedly to reduce the weight of the car. Because of this, the window itself has to form the seal, which could potentially damage the window if the door is mechanically opened. The electronic button lowers the window as it opens the door in order to reduce the risk.
Again, I don’t support this reasoning. I’m just sharing it.
It exists but anything that passively draws power would not normally be preferred for automotive. However with EVs it might not be such a big deal due to the enormous battery.
Best cars ever!
Boy that’s a metaphor, innit.
They forget about the mechanical latch?
-
Not all Teslas have mechanical latches on all doors. Specifically some Model Ys don’t have them on the rear doors, apparently. (This is addressed in the article.) ¹
-
The mechanical latches have often been panned on the safety front because they’re inobviously located and operated. Point 4 addresses this further, but look at the instructions for the rear door in the Model Y in particular.¹ This is complex and confusing without panic and adrenaline. (This too was addressed in the article.)
-
Not everybody knows about the mechanical latches. While one could argue that the driver should know their vehicle, what makes you think the passengers are going to know this, especially given the poor placement of the latches. Especially given just how convoluted the rear door releases are. (This was also addressed in the article.)
-
When people are in mortal danger, figuring out complicated things, or remembering obscure things like where the manual release latches are, is not going to happen. If the control to open the door isn’t open, obvious, and in your face, you will not remember it unless you’ve been specifically trained to have this in your immediate-recall memory. That’s why pilots of aircraft spend so much time drilling the same thing over and over again. Or people in militaries. Or people in emergency services like fire departments. (This was addressed in the article as well.)
¹ From https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-AAD769C7-88A3-4695-987E-0E00025F64E0.html “Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.”
They really should have addressed these issues in the article.
😏
-
They were too preoccupied with dying in a fire to pull out and read the owners manual.
Moreover, with the Model Y in particular, not all vehicles come with manual releases for the rear doors, as Tesla warns in the car’s manual. It’s unclear if the Model Y involved in the crash was equipped with the emergency feature.
from the article
Ok but they didn’t open the front doors either. This is an argument of “the emergency latch is not clear enough”, pretending there is no match is a losing argument
When you’re dying if smoke inhalation the subtle difference between “hard to find” and “not existent” door latches doesn’t matter - they’re effectively the same.
What the fuck are they doing over at Tesla to make it hard to open a door in an emergency
I didn’t know there was such thing as a mechanical latch and I’ve been a passenger in a tesla. Stop blaming the victims
Oh shit I guess I lost to your superior logic. Wonder why all these people keep dying, then.
Because the emergency latch isn’t easy to find?
If someone currently owns a Tesla, you want them to know a latch is there. That’s how you stop people from dying. Not by lying that it doesn’t exist.
