This happened in Toronto on October 24th
I can think of only a few situations where you’d want to get out of a car quickly, where you’d have enough time to look under all the matte covers to find a manual door release switch that may or may not be installed. A fire is certainly not one of them. At the very least shouldn’t they be equipped with a Nothammer…?
A lot of newer cars have stronger glass that even these or the spring-loaded kind can’t break.
tesla gonna tesla so I assume they are as dangerous as can be.
For the rest? There is always (?) one window that isn’t reinforced. So that CAN be an issue if your cabin is significantly damaged. But otherwise? It is a problem to find in a high adrenaline emergency and you SHOULD be aware which window to smash, but you are 3-6 smacks away from being out.
I heard Teslas are supposed to have manual release latches inside.
In any case, doors should always be manual anyway. This isn’t the first time this happened and I’m surprised there isn’t a regulation for this yet.
They do have manual release latches, but if you have never used them they might be hard to find. Especially in the panic of a burning car.
Really vehicle electronic doors should operate the same way they (usually?) do in buildings - in case of power loss they default to unlatched.
Power loss isn’t necessarily a good choice even in a traditional ICE car with a battery, let alone one with a bigass EV battery.
Because it makes it super easy to break into a car (pop the hood and unplug two connectors) AND very likely will remain charged throughout much of the fire.
No. The answer is you have fucking manual locks and door handles that don’t require you to pry open a panel.
The article says that some Model Ys don’t have a manual release on the rear doors. Can’t imagine how that passes any country’s safety standards.
If we investigated car accidents like we did plane accidents we’d probably have banned them by now.
Investigators arrive on scene. Immediately notice how the infrastructure was designed for gridlock rush hour where nothing is moving. Are appalled that the only safety training the motorists received was completed 20 years ago and never refreshed. Dismayed that these circumstances are permitted in densely populated areas.
The BMW manual door release is pulling the handle twice. This kind of negligence is insane and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should slap them with a punitive fine and a mandatory recall.
They do, but only in the front.
The only reason to use the button is that when you press it, it lowers the window slightly so that it clears the door trim when you open it (the windows are frameless).
Although, I don’t see why that couldn’t have been integrated into a single mechanism rather than having two separate controls for the same function.
Absolutely terrible design if the window needs to be lowered on a frameless door before it can be opened.
My 2007 Subaru Impreza had frameless windows that don’t have this problem. The window makes a pressure seal against a gasket that does not impede the operation of the door in any way.
The ones in the rear are hidden under a mat in the door.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-AAD769C7-88A3-4695-987E-0E00025F64E0.html
The model X requires you to remove the speaker grill to manually open the door.
You know, nice and intuitive.
Do these panels and speaker grills at least have a tooless design so they’re easy to remove if you’re aware of them? This design just sounds so dumb.
It looks like it, but they’re still hidden. If you didn’t know to look under a mat while you’re car is fire I doubt it would be easy to find.
The article also says that not all model Y have releases in the rear, so even if you know ‘well my model Y has them here’ you still might be screwed.
Is there an advantage to such an electronic door opener? If they have to include a manual release anyways, it really doesn’t seem like they’d save space.
I guess, there might be novelty to just pressing a button, but not burning alive is also quite a cool feature.
Why cant’t the doors be manual on an EV?
Of course they can, but then you don’t get those slick flush handles. Ain’t that a thing worth dying for?
best part is that the handles on the 3 and Y are manually actuated but have an electronic lock. so you push the wide part in to pop the handle out, and when you pull it it opens electronically. so stupid.
They are in the front. It’s super obvious. People pull them by accident all the time instead of the electric switch. It’s right where your hand rests on the front two doors.
“seemingly”
Ye, it seemed like it so we just decided we’d rather burn alive than to actually try opening the door.
News titles sometimes
Fair, but at least they’re reporting it and connecting the dots re: this tesla safety issue, which I haven’t seen from any legacy media
Worried about libel, it is very likely that someone like Musk would sue.
If they said “It was the fault of Tesla that these people are dead” without proof and without it being a quote from someone else, they can be sued pretty easily.
Authorities are still investigating the crash and fire. But the details that we have so far implicate to some degree the electronic doors used by Tesla and other automakers, which require power to open.
