Submitted 4 weeks ago by remington@beehaw.org to technology@beehaw.org
https://myelectricsparks.com/four-dead-tesla-doors-fail-open-crash-fire/
The title made it sound like a full lock-in. But one survived.
Harper grabbed a bar from his truck and handed it to another bystander, who managed to break the back window and pull the young woman to safety.
Tesla has faced criticism in the past for the design of its manual release levers, which are considered poorly designed and unintuitively placed.
Tesla has faced criticism in the past for the design of its manual release levers, which are considered poorly designed and unintuitively placed
Calling it poorly designed is a massive understatement. The manual release is a wire that is hidden behind a hidden panel. A guy made a video showing how to do it and he struggled to do it despite having practiced a few times in advance. The chance of pulling it off while the car was on fire would be very, very low
I have a friend who won’t put his kids in the back of his Tesla because of this.
Idk what the exact definition of a full lock in is, but if you have to break a window to get someone out I’d think it still qualifies.
Tesla has faced criticism in the past for the design of its manual release levers, which are considered poorly designed and unintuitively placed.
I like how the article delivered that fact in a way that focuses on their inadequacy while highlighting their existence. It’s like "we know they had a backup option, so shut up. They still weren’t good enough to be available for the emergency when they’re hidden behind shit.
If I put a half-wall up in my house in front of a visible window that can be used as emergency egress, I’m in shit. This hidden latch is no better.
Things that involve your human safety, should always fail open. What a travesty.
Regular doors with handles don’t fail open, there is just an Intuitive and common way to manually open them, which seems like the short coming here.
It definitely needs to be marked better. The latches are definitely there, but I think the thing that sucks with them, is the owners generally understand where this stuff is, but the passengers often don’t. I’m not denying that’s not an issue, it is. Especially when everyone else is dead. It also doesn’t help that everyone often stuffs rubber mats in the backdoors that cover over the mechanical switches. I feel like this could be pretty easily solved with a sticker on the door panel, pointing to the latch, but then everyone would probably complain how it looks and some would likely would peel it off. These are the exact same folks that can’t be bothered to read a manual either.
Mechanical latches can break in accidents too though, especially ones that operate on rods, which is lost in the hysteria here. Sometimes the doors just get bent real bad too, like I suspect even if the manual override worked in this door, these young adults hit the barrier at a very high speed, that door was going to have serious damage. You were probably going to have to use Jaws of Life or break the window no matter what. I used to drive an after hours tow truck years ago for a dealer that I worked for, and in quite a number of accidents (especially the high speed ones) the doors were no longer operable. It’s just one of those things
Setting aside anything specific to the mechanism in that vehicle, I suppose that keeping one of those window-breaker tools in the dash might have been a good idea, for a car of any sort.
That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.
That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.
Now is the time to change that.
And make sure it comes with a seat belt cutter.
I’ve heard that done Tesla models have laminate glass on the doors, like they make the windshield, making most glass breakers ineffective.
investigates
Hmm. Apparently some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.
reads further
It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.
info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-win…
You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.
There’s a couple things that I would like to point out here. I am a Tesla owner, not a huge fanboi or anything, but this is another press example of trying to incite fear.
One: this vehicle was travelling over 200km/hr. It hit a cement barrier. That car could have been made of bubble wrap, it wasnt going to be pretty, no matter what.
Two: there is a mechanical override in Tesla doors. You pull up on the latch at the top of the panel. It looks like a door handle. In fact, most people who are first riders in my car, end up pulling it before they realize there’s a door button there. Which is a pain in the ass because the door window doesn’t automatically roll down when it closes and it can damage the seals.
Also there’s other vehicles that have the exact same door systems, but the press also neglects to mention that. Corvettes are one that comes immediately to mind.
Again not totally a Tesla fanboi, I bought it before Elon went off the deep end. I do like the car though. Don’t hit shit at 200km/hr or drunk drive into ponds, and you are generally fine.
Thanks for the insight. I still want to voice my opinion that the window design is bad and Tesla and any other manufacturer using that design should feel bad.
I had a 2007 Subaru Impreza with frameless windows. There was no need to to worry about the window when closing the door. It simply made a pressure seal against the doorframe gasket.
There’s a lot of cars that use this same design, which I agree is annoying. I also have a Mini Cooper and it’s the exact same damn problem. It’s always a bugger to wash them too because water gets inside the window trim and then every time you open the door it smears water along the bottom and the top, because the window recesses to be closed.
The front latch is fine, but the rear one is a wire behind a piece of trim you have to remove (unless that has changed). The passengers in the rear would have to know where it was and how to use it. In an emergency, the likelihood of being able to do that is pretty low.
Having worked at the plant in Fremont: The design has probably changed multiple times just in the past month. They were constantly making small little changes to the way various things were put together so that not even a single batch of cars made in the same day would necessarily be exactly the same design. It was one of the few cool things about how they operate.
It’s sort of changed. There’s a big bend in the rubber now (which the passengers strangely think is a door handle), and it is an obvious grab point. Underneath is the panel, but it’s not one that you have to grab with your fingernails anymore, it’s got a big red tab that pops right off with the littlest pressure, exposing the wire. To me it’s fairly obvious, but I still think there should be a mandatory sticker on the panel. It’s not the greatest system either, but it exists whereas these news articles are trying to shape the narrative that it doesn’t (just like when that lady drunk drove into the pond). Probably isn’t the worst idea to ditch the rubber in the pocket over the override, that part is pretty stupid and doesn’t really serve a purpose anyways.
this vehicle was travelling over 200km/hr. It hit a cement barrier. That car could have been made of bubble wrap, it wasnt going to be pretty, no matter what.
The car looked like this after burning to a crisp. That’s a survivable wreck any day of the week (assuming seatbelts and airbags were in working order) but of course for the burning. The story says they hit a guard rail and eventually a cement pillar. Given the image, it doesn’t look like it was a head on collision and the passenger compartment is still in its original shape, so they were not likely to have been doing 200 kph by the time they hit the cement pillar. Guard rails (and I know this from experience with an unfortunate black ice incident that harmed nobody) will slow a car down quite a bit in not a whole lot of time, they’re not just there for show. My experience totalled the car, but it saved my whole family’s life by getting us down from 65 mph to 0 mph safely and in a very short period of time. It was shocking to see how short the deceleration had been once we drove past it in the daylight the following day and saw the tiny marks in the shoulder and the railing from our crash.
Crucially, one of the occupants of this Tesla crash did in fact survive, which makes it pretty clear what the survivability of the crash was. The fact is that people on the scene couldn’t get the car open from the outside and people that probably would have had a chance at otherwise being saved, burned to a crisp. You can say that the 125mph made it so they were doomed any way you look at it, but there were rescuers on the scene trying to get people out and the one person they managed to get out did in fact survive, so it’s probably disingenuous to claim that the battery fire and egress issues didn’t have anything to do with the deaths.
I’m not anti EV. My primary ride is an EV these days and I love it enough to say that everyone should drive an EV if they can manage, but claiming that the speed involved meant anyone in any vehicle would have met the same fate is probably not squaring with the reality here. The rescuer who saved the one passenger was surprised later that 4 other people had died, he claimed that it was hard to see other passengers in the car because of the thick smoke inside. I’m not saying that standard mechanical door handles would have saved the day for those 4, but it certainly seems like the lack thereof didn’t help, the battery fire component certainly made a bad situation worse, and the Model Y’s “unbreakable” laminate glass windows probably also pushed the equation more towards deadly than dangerous. I’ll admit that the press loves to bag on an EV, but there are legit dangers with battery damage and Tesla isn’t doing any favors for addressing them by making manual egress more difficult than it has to be with their design choices.
Just one thing I’d like to point out, it looks like that, sure. Notice how it’s missing the entire B pillar? That didn’t burn off, they had to do extensive cutting.
Also this is how it looked from a side view: toronto.citynews.ca/2024/10/24/…/amp/
The accident was at high speed. That car is mangled. This is the press making a very big deal out of facts that aren’t entirely straight (there’s no way to open the doors manually! - when there is), and it’s heavily reliant on the words of a 74 year old man who’s feeding into this. It’s definitely food for thought, but it’s also a lot of hysteria.
Elmo is too cheap to give his customers real door handles when it can be done in software.
it aint just tesla. i was at a wedding this week and one of my pals rented an electric Ford. no regular door handles, no buttons. we ended up roasting it the whole time. the future is now! he paid $40 to get 200 miles of charge and it only took 90 minutes. all the buttons were screens and the levers were buttons or knobs! seriously stupid
The touch pad control shit just sends me “yah, let’s get rid of these cheap, easily manufactured and implemented dials and knobs that can be easily operated without looking and replace them with an expensive touch screen that you need to look away from the road to use, that’s truly the way of the future; Unnecessarily expensive, more difficult to use, and reliant on software that will probably get bricked in 3 years when the executives lay off the team maintaining it so they can give them selves a pay raise.”
This raises serious concerns about Tesla’s safety features, especially the door mechanisms in emergencies. Hope this leads to improvements in vehicle design and safety protocols.
storksforlegs@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
Well when you get cars designed by people who think safety regulation can be ignored, this is what you get.
Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
The fact that Elon is going to help Trump gut all of our federal agencies makes me sick to my stomach. Trump winning the election is like a terrible nightmare that I can’t wake up from.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
Teslas are among the safest cars on the road by all metrics. It’s just that they get the most press out of all EVs, because they are 1) sort of a poster child for electric vehicles due to how influential the Model S was and 2) due to that idiot at the helm of the company receiving constant attention from the press.