One thing to note is that the car doors in Teslas are electrically controlled and a different failsafe method of opening the doors is required when the electrical system isn't working. Here's the steps for manually opening the Model Y's rear doors (car in the story the post links to): https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-AAD769C... and here's the steps for manually opening the Model S's rear doors (car in the story I linked to): https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-AAD769C... . Note that this involves removing the rear carpet in the Model S and the door pocket mat in the Model Y, and that the Model Y instructions note that some cars aren't even equipped with manual rear door releases. It seems like Tesla didn't account at all for what happens if passengers who aren't familiar with the car need to quickly exit in an emergency, especially if the driver's incapacitated and can't give them directions.
Especially egregious considering it's likely kids will be back there. And the release is in a place thats probably impossible to get to from the front seat (in the model Y)
Someone on Mastodon pointed out that not all Model Ys even have the manual release. I didn't believe this could be true - how could regulators allow this?
"Tesla didn't account at all for what happens ..."
Tesla might not have, but you can. Always have a glass breaker and seatbelt cutter in your vehicle. Doors get crumpled and can't open regardless of make/model.
What is an "unlikely event" for any given passenger is nearly a 100% certainty for Tesla. The engineers and product managers who came up with that solution probably have trouble sleeping at night these days.
I bet they wanted something more obvious but were overridden by someone who wanted to keep the vehicle sleek and futuristic. If so, it's the worst kind of "I told you so" :/
I'm always surprised to see this comment without seeing a response that this is required by law in the United States. Remember child locks? They are on all cars. The manual release cannot override the child lock so it has to be hidden to meet federal law.
Lexus’s latest cars have electrically controlled doors as well. The mechanical failover is a bit better mind you, you have to pull twice instead of pushing, but I am not sure how panic proof it is.
I live techlnology but IMHO it is overdone in modern cars. Please bring back tactile and mechanical controls where possible.
I’d be curious if there’s a single brand that has no electronic door latches at this point. Every brand I can think of has them on at least one vehicle. They have been in mainstream brands (like Chevy) for like 20+ years now.
Regulations are written in blood.. it’s really disappointing to see a car make it to production without an obvious mechanical way to open the door. I’ve been in many teslas and hadn’t given this much thought, figuring there’d surely be a way to open the door if I need to get out.
A lot of cars have electronically controlled doors.
It’s due to the frameless windows. Opening the door requires the windows to roll down slightly to avoid damage to the outer trim.
The doors still have a mechanical release so there’s no cost savings involved. For the front door they’re right next to the electronic release. For the rear doors they’re hidden under the passenger door pocket.
Edit: to everyone replying I never said it was a necessity. I explained why they did it. I’m aware of alternate approaches.
To make the marks they're selling the death sedans to feel like they have something special until the vape batteries under the car spontaneously combust and roast them like a gas station hotdog
I always thought it was a luxury item like soft close doors on high end luxury cars. Supposed to feel premium compared to actually pulling a mechanical handle.
Damn if only we had the tech to open doors mechanically. Imagine that world. I hope Elon takes a few weeks away from destroying the US Government in January to think about this./s
For real though, I hope the relatives of the deceased take Elon personally and Tesla as a company for all they're worth.
> Note that this involves removing the rear carpet in the Model S and the door pocket mat in the Model Y
Seriously? How many people would be capable of pulling this stunt off in a burning vehicle filled with smoke? Especially considering the fact that in this case the vehicle was packed (5 people in it)--it's hard enough to get your own feet out of the way.
If this passes the safety regulations, those regulations should be changed. Not just expecting car manufacturers to do it out of their good will because they won't.
Regulations are written in blood. This is likely the first time a mass produced car went this far in not caring about the humans inside. I would say that they will be new regulations soon, but given the political climate in the US, I'm unsure if it will actually happen.
We can only hope that Canada and other countries takes the lead and forces the improvements to passenger safety.
> Tesla has faced criticism in the past for the design of its manual release levers, which are considered poorly designed and unintuitively placed. These emergency measures require intimate knowledge of the car, something that may not be feasible in a panic situation.
First, how is this remotely legal? Are there not safety standards to ensure adults can easily exit a vehicle on fire?
Second, regardless of regulations, what on earth were they thinking at Tesla? Cars catch on fire and need fast emergency exit. Do they not care that their passengers might die?
I am absolutely horrified by this. Those poor passengers.
This seems like a huge failure on the part of the NTSB. Tesla is getting a lot of attention for this incident, but are there other manufactures that would have had the exact same problem given this same incident?
The entire point of organizations like the NTSB is to prevent unsafe cars from going into production.
The NTSB has given this type of door opening a green light. WHY?
> This seems like a huge failure on the part of the NTSB.
This is a deep misunderstanding. NTSB is not an organization with a regulatory power - it is an "investigative" agency. It does not have any mandate or power to stop anyone from doing anything. It can investigate and issue recommendations and reports to other agencies that have the actual power - FAA, FHA, NHTSA, etc, etc.
Unfortunately the NTSB doesn't actually have that power...
It's an investigative agency, intended to investigate accidents and make recommendations. Unfortunately, they're just that: recommendations, not mandates. It's up to the agencies that govern the respective industries to issue regulations enforcing those recommendations (i.e., the NHTSA or FAA).
In reading a bit on this topic: According to the NTSB, vehicle models with automatic locking doors should automatically unlock after an accident.
This begs the question did the door automatically unlock? Perhaps the vehicle was so damaged that the door could not be opened due to structural damaged to the door itself.
The tolerance on many doors is such that even with a slight amount of damage, they are "physically" unable to open. The latch mechanism can get "jammed". Per the NTSB, they recommend that all electronic locks disengage in the case of an accident. Does Tesla follow this recommendation?
It's possible the vehicle was damaged in such a way that none of the door could open because of mechanical interferences.
As someone else has pointed out, a car with electronic opening won't open even an unlocked door without power, so the Tesla could be compliant without meeting the spirit of the recommendation.
Actions speak. Also, think of the many hours, spent by many people, designing, testing, writing the manual, manufacturing, etc. Lots of people need to sleep at night.
On the other hand, many in our society devalue human life in the name of progress, anti-liberal politics, etc. If society shrugs at Covid deaths, war deaths, oppression, climate change death and costs - why worry about this?
US safety standards require that a child cannot manually open a rear door if child locks are engaged. An emergency manual release can't appear and disappear depending on whether the electronic button is enabled. Children die this way in all cars.
And now he's bought his way into US aristocracy so he can do whatevr he wants and no one can stop him. He doesn't like criticism from the NTHSB? Well he can deem the NTHSB "inefficient" and have it downsized and the leaders sacked. Does the FTC think he's lying about his self-driving claims? Well maybe the FTC is inefficient and he just makes a call to Trump and the DoJ won't be investigating anything either. The US is now completely an oligarchy and kleptocracy.
Don't worry, I'm confident that with Enron Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency, if this is illegal now it won't be for much longer. People like Musk are just natural born problem solvers.
I’ll leave a thought that isn’t a Tesla criticism (because the others are good): everybody should carry a lifehammer in their car. If not for saving your own life, it might come in handy for saving somebody else’s.
I don't buy safety/medical products from Amazon. There was a time (maybe even today still) where those products go into a big bin with no verification of who the actual supplier was (1st vs 3rd party). I don't know how to verify if the issue has been resolved today, but life-critical items such as tourniquets, meds, etc. are expected to be 100% made by the supplier. Unfortunately, the money in the industry is so big that "cheap Chinese knockoffs" are being sold as high-quality replicas, even though they may not meet all the required specs.
There were many cases a few years ago of people buying branded tourniquets, only to be sold fake ones. The item looked genuine, but the integrity of the plastic could not maintain the pressures needed and broke. An emergency is not the time to realize that mistake.
I'd add that for anything your life depends on, my general rule is don't buy from Amazon. Buy from the manufacturer. Way too many counterfeits on Amazon.
Lifehammers don't work on laminated glass, like your front windshield (that would be bad, as it would mean a rock chip would shatter your window).
But more and more manufactures are putting in laminated side windows in their cars both for comfort (noise) and rollover protection, so Lifehammers don't work there either.
This isn't a solution though; the driver of an uber may have a lifehammer somewhere, but the passengers don't know about it. It is simply criminal not to have an obvious way to open the door.
Maybe cars should be designed with a small button and a system to do that when airbag is deployed.
If you carry a fireweapon, don't lose time finding the lifehammer (But then we need to choose between bulletproof glasses for external threats or breakable glasses for internal danger. Both options are exclusive).
This is way too big for everyday carry, just in case my Lyft happens to be a model S. They should forbid those as cabs or take them off the road entirely.
I recently had a break-in to my Tesla. All captured on sentry mode. The thief got in with a subtle, barely visible stab of their wrist. The Tesla service person who replaced my window figured it was a spark plug. In the video they barely make contact with my window and the whole window shatters, completely.
So maybe at least storing spark plugs in each door bin.
(Btw none of the relevant police jurisdictions cared a whit about the break in. There were cameras where it occurred. I’m not sure what the societal discouragement is for car break-jns. Seems like the relevant authorities have basically granted permission to car hooliganism. They took the police report but explicitly acknowledged no one would look at it.)
It is the spark plug insulator. They are using the ceramic from it to break the glass.
I remember hearing about this in the 90s with thieves carrying insulators on strings in their pockets.
The model Y's inability to roll down its rear windows is another safety liability. I had to vomit out of an Uber and had much difficulty getting my head out the tiny opening.
This is an issue with many modern cars, not just Tesla. The rear windows physically can’t roll all the way down due to the shape of the doors.
One way to solve it might be to design a window mechanism where the glass rotates in the frame rather than just sliding on a single axis. But as always, there’s a cost and complexity trade off.
> This tragic incident has sparked a debate about the safety features of electric vehicles and the necessity for more intuitive emergency mechanisms.
Tesla is an ever-more-irritating case study in what happens when you throw out all the accumulated wisdom of an industry, dismissing them as aging dinosaurs, because you know code.
For most of the last century and change, cars have had some predictable behaviors. In the event of a total power loss (engine, electrical, etc), you can still steer the car, brake the car to a safe and controlled stop, and get out of the car. As far as I knew, these were basic certification requirements, once those things came around. You can't do a pure drive-by-wire system, because when (not if, when) things go badly wrong, you still need to be able to control the vehicle. This is why we have mechanical linkages between the steering wheel and the front wheels, hydraulic brakes that function without booster vacuum, mechanical door opening levers, etc.
In a panic situation, say, "car is on fire," people are not going to calmly consider how to remove bits of carpet and access the emergency release mechanism they don't know about. They are going to yank on the normal door opening lever, repeatedly. It should be a basic certification requirement that this works, at least for the front doors (I'm willing to grant that the rear doors can have the "interior handle disabled" child safety things, but also, once your kids are out of car seats, this shouldn't be left enabled).
Tesla's arrogance about the lessons learned by the last century of the auto industry is killing people. I'm sure they've justified it internally as "Well, once our self driving stuff is working, our cars will never crash or fail so this doesn't matter," but come on. It's been a decade and that stuff still isn't working, so maybe put some mechanical door handles on your cars.
My Chevrolet truck while having an actual door latch, doesn’t open the doors if they’re locked. You have to pull twice.
Is that an electronic counter (likely) or mechanical? If the latter, no big deal, if the former it’s even worse than the Tesla - at least my MY has a separate mechanical over ride.
Readit News
One thing to note is that the car doors in Teslas are electrically controlled and a different failsafe method of opening the doors is required when the electrical system isn't working. Here's the steps for manually opening the Model Y's rear doors (car in the story the post links to): https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-AAD769C... and here's the steps for manually opening the Model S's rear doors (car in the story I linked to): https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-AAD769C... . Note that this involves removing the rear carpet in the Model S and the door pocket mat in the Model Y, and that the Model Y instructions note that some cars aren't even equipped with manual rear door releases. It seems like Tesla didn't account at all for what happens if passengers who aren't familiar with the car need to quickly exit in an emergency, especially if the driver's incapacitated and can't give them directions.
But it's actually listed on the Model Y page (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-AAD769C...): "Note Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors."
Not sure what the distribution is or whether it's just an "old version" problem?
Tesla might not have, but you can. Always have a glass breaker and seatbelt cutter in your vehicle. Doors get crumpled and can't open regardless of make/model.
Isn't this advice becoming dated now that most new cars have side windows with laminated glass?
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a28422725/car-windows-glas...
I live techlnology but IMHO it is overdone in modern cars. Please bring back tactile and mechanical controls where possible.
It’s due to the frameless windows. Opening the door requires the windows to roll down slightly to avoid damage to the outer trim.
The doors still have a mechanical release so there’s no cost savings involved. For the front door they’re right next to the electronic release. For the rear doors they’re hidden under the passenger door pocket.
Edit: to everyone replying I never said it was a necessity. I explained why they did it. I’m aware of alternate approaches.
For real though, I hope the relatives of the deceased take Elon personally and Tesla as a company for all they're worth.
> Double down on the crazy shit this time for real
Seriously? How many people would be capable of pulling this stunt off in a burning vehicle filled with smoke? Especially considering the fact that in this case the vehicle was packed (5 people in it)--it's hard enough to get your own feet out of the way.
If this passes the safety regulations, those regulations should be changed. Not just expecting car manufacturers to do it out of their good will because they won't.
We can only hope that Canada and other countries takes the lead and forces the improvements to passenger safety.
First, how is this remotely legal? Are there not safety standards to ensure adults can easily exit a vehicle on fire?
Second, regardless of regulations, what on earth were they thinking at Tesla? Cars catch on fire and need fast emergency exit. Do they not care that their passengers might die?
I am absolutely horrified by this. Those poor passengers.
The entire point of organizations like the NTSB is to prevent unsafe cars from going into production.
The NTSB has given this type of door opening a green light. WHY?
This is a deep misunderstanding. NTSB is not an organization with a regulatory power - it is an "investigative" agency. It does not have any mandate or power to stop anyone from doing anything. It can investigate and issue recommendations and reports to other agencies that have the actual power - FAA, FHA, NHTSA, etc, etc.
It's an investigative agency, intended to investigate accidents and make recommendations. Unfortunately, they're just that: recommendations, not mandates. It's up to the agencies that govern the respective industries to issue regulations enforcing those recommendations (i.e., the NHTSA or FAA).
This begs the question did the door automatically unlock? Perhaps the vehicle was so damaged that the door could not be opened due to structural damaged to the door itself.
It's possible the vehicle was damaged in such a way that none of the door could open because of mechanical interferences.
On the other hand, many in our society devalue human life in the name of progress, anti-liberal politics, etc. If society shrugs at Covid deaths, war deaths, oppression, climate change death and costs - why worry about this?
https://www.amazon.com/Lifehammer-Brand-Safety-Hammer-Nether...
Don’t buy the cheap Chinese knockoffs.
There were many cases a few years ago of people buying branded tourniquets, only to be sold fake ones. The item looked genuine, but the integrity of the plastic could not maintain the pressures needed and broke. An emergency is not the time to realize that mistake.
Lifehammers don't work on laminated glass, like your front windshield (that would be bad, as it would mean a rock chip would shatter your window).
But more and more manufactures are putting in laminated side windows in their cars both for comfort (noise) and rollover protection, so Lifehammers don't work there either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptaIBTyiKkc
I believe in the USA lots of tests are actually done without seatbelts, and this makes the requirements harder to meet.
If you carry a fireweapon, don't lose time finding the lifehammer (But then we need to choose between bulletproof glasses for external threats or breakable glasses for internal danger. Both options are exclusive).
Deleted Comment
So maybe at least storing spark plugs in each door bin.
(Btw none of the relevant police jurisdictions cared a whit about the break in. There were cameras where it occurred. I’m not sure what the societal discouragement is for car break-jns. Seems like the relevant authorities have basically granted permission to car hooliganism. They took the police report but explicitly acknowledged no one would look at it.)
https://www.carparts.com/blog/can-a-spark-plug-break-a-windo...
note from the article: "Keeping Spark Plug Shards Might Be Illegal in Your State" so keep that in mind
As someone with a large head myself, I can most definitely fit it out comfortably of mine.
One way to solve it might be to design a window mechanism where the glass rotates in the frame rather than just sliding on a single axis. But as always, there’s a cost and complexity trade off.
Tesla is an ever-more-irritating case study in what happens when you throw out all the accumulated wisdom of an industry, dismissing them as aging dinosaurs, because you know code.
For most of the last century and change, cars have had some predictable behaviors. In the event of a total power loss (engine, electrical, etc), you can still steer the car, brake the car to a safe and controlled stop, and get out of the car. As far as I knew, these were basic certification requirements, once those things came around. You can't do a pure drive-by-wire system, because when (not if, when) things go badly wrong, you still need to be able to control the vehicle. This is why we have mechanical linkages between the steering wheel and the front wheels, hydraulic brakes that function without booster vacuum, mechanical door opening levers, etc.
In a panic situation, say, "car is on fire," people are not going to calmly consider how to remove bits of carpet and access the emergency release mechanism they don't know about. They are going to yank on the normal door opening lever, repeatedly. It should be a basic certification requirement that this works, at least for the front doors (I'm willing to grant that the rear doors can have the "interior handle disabled" child safety things, but also, once your kids are out of car seats, this shouldn't be left enabled).
Tesla's arrogance about the lessons learned by the last century of the auto industry is killing people. I'm sure they've justified it internally as "Well, once our self driving stuff is working, our cars will never crash or fail so this doesn't matter," but come on. It's been a decade and that stuff still isn't working, so maybe put some mechanical door handles on your cars.
Is that an electronic counter (likely) or mechanical? If the latter, no big deal, if the former it’s even worse than the Tesla - at least my MY has a separate mechanical over ride.
it isn't electronic in the case of BMW. I don't know what Chevrolet does.