what happens when a car catches fire because the electrical system is on fire and you can’t Open the door because it’s electric
There are manual releases on each door inside, but I’m surprised they don’t have them outside as well.
Reading more about it, I find that many only have manual releases on the front doors until recently and they have a connection point you’re meant to jump with power to unlock and open from the outside. I didn’t think anyone would be okay waiting for a jump to get their baby out, but then these people waited for firemen to break their window, so…
Hidden manual releases that still require you to push the door through the windows trim. FFS people have already died because of this shit. Why the hell hasn’t there been a mandatory recall on all Teslas over this?
It’s not fucking hidden, it’s right on the fucking door. Right there, in plain view. Fuck elon but equally fuck idiots who never read their manual or bother to learn fucking anything about a product then claim bullshit like that. Nothing about this is fucking hidden.
The rear doors also have one, that’s the only one you could argue is “hidden” as it’s in the little storage pocket area
Edit: turns out this is only in the M3, the Y, X, And CT are all designed by absolute idiots, and i joined them by not looking into all models
A child isn’t going to find that. A rescuer who isn’t familiar with Teslas isn’t going to be able to find that.
I couldn’t even figure out how to open a fully functional door from outside the first time I got in a Tesla. I’m an adult who’s been driving my entire life.
That’s not innovation; it’s a safety hazard for the sake of the aesthetics of a handle that doesn’t stick out. I don’t view that as a reasonable trade-off.
At least it looks different than all the other door opening mechanisms. also rtfm before driving a car. Safety shouldn’t influence artistic choice btw.
I’m not reading the manual of the Uber I’m about to climb into. A firefighter isn’t going to read the manual of a car they’re trying to pry me out of.
I DO read the manual on the Kia I actually drive. To read about the recommendations for the tires. To read about replacing fuses. To find the load hauling capacity. Not how to open the fucking door.
safety shouldn’t influence artistic choice
Did you really just string those words together in all seriousness without a hint of irony? And that folks is exactly why we need the NHTSA.
Aesthetic choice should be more important than idiotic safety for personal vehicles. It should be every American’s right to drive vehicles that put them selves in higher danger, especially if it means proper defense from firefighters.
The car’s owner, Renee Sanchez, was taking her granddaughter to the zoo, but after loading the child in the Model Y, she closed the door and wasn’t able to open it again. “My phone key wouldn’t open it,” Sanchez said in an interview with Arizona’s Family. “My car key wouldn’t open it.” She called emergency services, and firefighters were dispatched to help.
Just so nobody thinks someone left a kid in the car and then went into a store or something. Tesla should be paying for the broken window repair at the very least.
Also, this is similar to a use case that Telsa likes to promote. They allow you to leave the climate on while the car is locked.
This makes me never want to trust the dog and camp modes they advertise.
In this specific example, I believe the driver buckled the child, closed the door, then was unable to open any door before starting the vehicle. Is it possible to either start the vehicle or at least turn on the climate control from outside? If not, this was a horribly dangerous situation.
Yeah, this wasn’t even intentional. The car just shit out while she was getting the car situated. Very scary.
Not even the door locks are mechanical? So much built-in obsolescence…
I haven’t has a car with mechanical locks in a long time. I’ve also not had a battery so dead the locks didn’t work.
There’s usually some sort of mechanical release for safety for stuff like this.
On the mach E, my understanding is there’s a panel where you hook up a jump box that supplies power to those circuits to allow you to use your key fob to open the door. But there’s no bladed key to manually unlock the car. So technically there’s a failsafe but it’s not ideal. And I agree it ought not be allowed.
how the fuck are you going to put power into the thing if you don’t have a charged battery
what the fuck is wrong with putting a door handle somewhere
it’s really smart to have non-mechanical mechanical parts for things like a door
If only we had the technology to open doors without power. One day, perhaps.
But how do you integrate a subscription fee into analog doors? You can‘t enshitify that!!
Or the foresight to have a small backup battery unit used exclusively for emergencies like say when the battery goes out or when someone reverses their car into a lake. The fact these are such death traps shows just how bad the US is when it comes to giving a flying fuck about people over money.
And all the while Elon is touted as some kind of super Lex Lutherian genius.
Honestly if I wrote a fictional book with some of the shit he’s done and how the world looks at him publishers would throw it back in my face as being the most unbelievable POS they’ve read in the past 20 years.
According to a report from Arizona’s Family:
The 12-volt battery that powers the car’s electronics died without warning.
Tesla drivers are supposed to receive three warnings before that happens, but the Tesla service department confirmed that Sanchez didn’t receive any warnings.
Lead acid batteries are notoriously hard to predict when they will fail. Other OEMs also fail at this often.
Tesla upgraded to lithium 12V batts some time ago, which are much more predictable and last 2-3x longer.
What? No they aren’t. They almost always fail on a curve of power and voltage loss.
Also, I didn’t look it up, but I’d be very surprised if the model Y tesla didn’t require (suggest and oem?) an AGM battery. It’s still lead, but due to how they’re made they can’t get a dead short in them like older regular lead acid batteries can once they get old, although it still isn’t very common for it to happen.
Yes they are. I used to test them for a living. It’s just a best guess.
No they aren’t. They degrade before they fail. If tesla wanted to provide a warning of a failing battery that pretty much always worked it could have wired in a load test and went off voltage drop under a heavier load.
Testing if batteries are good or bad does not qualify a person to chart out battery degradation.
No they aren’t.
Yes. They are. If they weren’t, no one would have these problems. But they all do. I know everyone likes to pour over them with a microscope and drool over their flaws because they’re Tesla, but many of the issues commonly attributed to them are common with all other OEMs, you just have a bunch of armchair engineers who don’t know WTF they’re talking about.
They degrade before they fail.
No shit
If tesla wanted to provide a warning of a failing battery that pretty much always worked it could have wired in a load test and went off voltage drop under a heavier load.
Once again, I did this for a living, for a decade. We would constantly have cars with failed batteries, we would bring them in, charge them up, test them, they would pass, we’d send them on their way, and they would fail again, and come back for replacement. Our load tests also tested the alternator.
I worked on BMWs for years and they would regularly come in with the same problem, with no warning, even though they had a similar detection algorithm that mostly worked.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment; it has dissolved its press office.
Sounds like journalists can just make shit up and publish it. “Telsa declined to comment.” so I guess it’s true until corrected.
Failsafe.
Fail Safe.
Fail Open.
Elon is why we need to write safety regulations. He’s the kind of guy who would put sawdust in your food and call it innovation.
Agree on your overall sentiment, though I’d say it is a bit more complicated than that for car doors. You don’t want it to fail and come open while moving, for example, especially if the car is coming to a stop and inertia forces the doors fully open. That Boeing door failed open and it was not very safe.
Vehicle doors should be fail functional rather than open to fail safe. As in designed to be very unlikely to fail and/or still functional even if one or several components do fail.
Edit: I normally avoid commenting on my downvotes (you win some, you lose some) but this one is baffling. What’s controversial or unpopular about what I said?
Sure, for the electrical part. But the door as a whole should Fail Open. You can pull over with an open door. You should not have to break the door to escape after a failure.
I’d say it is a bit more complicated than that for car doors.
Car doors work fine on every car but a Tesla. They aren’t some new technology invented by Tesla where design flaws like this are understandable. Tesla just does things so badly that they invent brand new dangers that only exist with their vehicles.
You don’t want it to fail and come open
That isn’t what “fail open” means. It doesn’t mean that the moment the battery dies all the doors fly open. It means that when the battery dies the doors aren’t latched shut like a bank safe.
At a minimum, the key should offer a way to open the car from the outside when the battery is dead. It’s completely asinine to put the only emergency latch on the inside of the car where you can’t use it, especially since it is hidden so deep most people can’t find it without the manual.
What’s controversial or unpopular about what I said?
You’re giving Elon Musk’s awful cars the benefit of a doubt by pretending that this isn’t a completely reckless design flaw that should never have existed in the first place, and you are deliberately misinterpreting what “fail open” means to make it sound like a ridiculous solution instead of the industry safety best practice that it actually is.
Also, you’re complaining about downvotes, so expect even more now I guess.
Car doors that aren’t on teslas don’t fail open, they are reliable enough that I can’t think of hearing about any failures that don’t involve a collision and deforming of the door (in which case it’s a fail closed and they use the jaws of life to get people out, or another door).
An electronic latch is either engaged or it isn’t. Fail open would mean that in the absence of an electronic signal saying it should be closed, the latch will default to not being engaged, which would mean there’s nothing holding the door closed if another force acts on it.
Don’t assume any benefit of the doubt about Tesla’s. I made no comment one way or another about what I think of their doors vs other doors. For the record, I agree completely that they fucked up this part of the design. The purpose of my comment was to say that taking that design and adding “fail open” to it won’t fix it. Fail open and fail closed both have problems with an electronic latch and the only way to fix it without causing other big problems is to design it in a way that still functions as a door that can be open or latched closed whether or not the electronic part of the latch is working.
And I’m “deliberately misinterpreting” what fail open means? I’m having trouble understanding how it can mean anything other than how I’m interpreting it, even with your clarification, given the disagreement about other car doors failing open. Maybe it’s a misnomer that I’m misinterpreting but why are you assuming I’m doing this in bad faith?
The downvotes themselves don’t matter, I asked because I wanted to know the reasoning behind them, well aware that bringing them up at all will probably result in more of them.
