Tesla owners are modifying their cars to be escapable if the car catches fire, because the doors stop working like normal and you need to rely on well-hidden mechanical overrides.
Which… feels pretty dangerous, like that’s the worst possible time for the doors to stop working like normal.
Another reason not to buy a Tesla
That’s just for a few models and just on the front two doors, the rear you have to remove a panel you also have to know exists because it’s not marked in hivis. The fun one is that Tesla says you break your warranty if you actually use any of the manual releases including the y’s really accessible front one.
Front and back directly accessible for model 3 and y.
Used it. Can’t tell if it was used, so warranty still intact.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-A7A60DC7-E476-4A86-9C9C-10F4A276AB8B.html
No they’re not. The front and rear are almost identical procedures to both the cyber truck and the y.
Also yes they can, they’re built tamper evident for warranty reasons.
I recently went car shopping, and I had considered an EV. I told someone this, and she immediately started recommending Tesla to me, despite Elon’s bullshit. She tried to tell me that Elon’s insanity doesn’t change that Tesla is the “best product in the space”.
I have to admit, Elon’s bullshit was a big factor in not even giving Tesla the time of day, but there’s also issues just like this one. I do not want a car that prioritizes gee-whiz geegaws over basic safety like this.
Having now driven basically all the EV vehicles available in my country, from the byd range to Hyundai, Nissan and Tesla, Tesla is just a straight mess of a vehicle by comparison, and don’t even get me started on the Tesla indicator thing. Oh and they feel cheap on the inside, even the plaid and other high end ones. Lol
Yeah, I ended up going with a Hyundai. I take delivery on it later this week, and I can’t wait.
R.I.P. Cord
OH NO I LOLLED
The manual door open on some models of Teslas require removing 2 panels that are not labeled and need a diagram to know how to remove them. Another requires removing the speaker grill and pulling an unlabeled wire.
Even once the manual door release is pulled, without power you need a firefighter’s upper body strength to open the door, and it’s likely that flames and poisonous smoke will be coming up any tiny gap you can create by pushing open the door a little.
Just willful disregard of your customers’ lives.
no they probably want you to die after the accident so that you can’t tell people how the auto drive feature drove you into the building
Honestly, this seems more like incompetence. They hired tech bros to make a car, not safety engineers. How these cars got through safety regulations is beyond me.
I’ve been saying this a lot lately because it seems like arc words for the zeitgeist we’re living through but good gods above and below it just keeps being relevant:
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
When shit’s this stupid, it doesn’t matter whether they meant it or not…
Point taken.
Simple, the regulations don’t talk about any of that shit.
US road regulations are a blend of smart, fucking stupid, and just plain missing regulations.
The fact any current “standard” pickup trucks are allowed on the road despite nearly half the population being short enough that they can’t see over the hood is just one of the most obvious examples that the US road regulations are pointless to try and make sense of.
This all sounds mostly right to me. But the regulations aren’t pointless, they’re just incomplete. I’m still quite happy that we have these protections.
And also, you tend to only get regulations on issues after they’ve proven to be a problem. It’s like warning labels, if you see a label that says “don’t put your hand here” it may be because someone did once, and it was bad.
So with that in mind, there hasn’t previously been any need for regulations on door handles that don’t work without power, because it’s never been an issue before. Now that we see a need for that kind of regulation, we may see it go onto the books. Now it’s true that we shouldn’t have to spell that kind of thing out in legislation, but (and I can’t stress this enough) people can be very dumb…
Now, guess which of those two vehicles is regularly used for anything that actually requires a truck bed vs which of those is used to pick up kids from school.
But how else would Tesla sell futurism to its customers? Door handles and keys are old tech, we need 21st century tech, at all cost!
This is completely false.
The front doors open by lifting the armrest. The rear doors have a lever just like an ordinary car (as the video in the link shows).
If the car doesn’t have the power or is too damaged to open the door normally and you need to use the manual release then it probably won’t retract the window that tiny bit either. Which means using the manual release will break the window. You can Google around for it but here’s an example from a Tesla forum.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/images/GUID-10B10D56-4FF2-4611-AEBA-F864E73E8C2F-online-en-US.png
And it’s not as obvious as it looks in the photo. It’s a fabric/carpeted texture in a dark recessed pocket (that may have stuff in it)
It’s in no way obvious, I had to look it up to find it in my parents Tesla, even then it took me a while to work out. Absolutely terrifying if you consider that those in the back of a Tesla are unlikely to be the owners who have read the manual.
My parents had no idea about it.
This is recent too (about a year old?)
Can you share a screen shot from the video of the back seat lever you’re describing?
I’m not seeing it. And I wrote the article, so I’m pretty sure I would have :j
This is only true of the model 3 and Y, and not all model years if the 3.
They’re describing older 3’s, x’s and s’s.
Also all rear doors are under carpet or behind panels. Better hope the driver is conscious.
if only there was an easier way of not getting trapped in a car…
Yeah but that’s really hard to do and has never been invented before!
How is this legal? Who let these vehicles on the road?
You don’t tend to write a rule stating “passengers must be able to easily escape the vehicle in an emergency” until some tech bro makes it hard.
Thing is though, this happened with the Delorean back in the day, so it’s not a new problem at all.
Oh did it? I hadn’t known it had difficult to open doors. Was it by design or just something to do with the gullwings?
It’s far dumber than that. The door release was electric, and the alternator wasn’t powerful enough to run everything on the vehicle. So, if you were driving at night, with your headlights, wipers, heater etc running, you’d be slowly running your battery down, until the voltage got too low to run the ignition, and the vehicle would shut off.
And you’d be trapped in a dead vehicle on the side of the road, in the dark, with no lights.
I, for one, am baffled.
How didn’t this get recalled after the first escapable entrapment death? I could find 12 fire deaths where the occupants were evidently trapped, and that was just my dumb ass Googling for an afternoon for recent cases, I’m sure there’s more.
Sarcasm (but also sadly likely Tesla’s take): How are you so sure they wanted to get out?
If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall?
You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiple it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement ©.
A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall.
If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall.
Which car company do you work for?
A major one.
Fuck I need to watch fight club againThat quote opened my eyes
I remember something similar happening with the Delorean DMC-12, and they were absolutely ridiculed for it.
And some of those are really horrific. I think in one of the CA crashes, one person was able to be pulled out a window before the battery cooking off got too hot for anyone to approach and help the three others who were trapped and died.
Reading that coverage was fucking heartbreaking. Pointless, stupid, preventable.
And you know what? The rescuer kid and the rescued kid are both going to be haunted by that forever.
Regulators figured nobody would be stupid enough to mess that up and no paragraphs are needed to make things explicit. Then came Elon who thought that technically correct is the best kind of correct so he made this abomination of a manual release.
Probably the same person who let them on the road with a screen-swipe control for shifting with NO indicator of the gear you are in.
Wow that’s a extremely stupid shifter control
Stupider than the “volume knob repurposed as a shifter” from Jeep
I did not realize how fucking stupid the gear selector was. I’m even angrier than when I started, and I started pretty angry.
Those are only the newer versions from the last year or so. They used to have regular fucking stalks. Even after they swapped the wheel for the yolk.
*Yoke
Price of eggs
Elon
These stupid cucks…
Huh, this reminded me of Five Nights at Freddy’s and how even with murderous robots around, there is a safety precaution where the doors open incase power goes out.
It’s probably easier to get one of those ceramic window breakers and get out that way. I’m pretty sure the rip cords are actually quite hard to pull.
They use laminate glass on the side windows as well as windshield on some models for noise reduction. Traditional window breaking tools don’t work on them. It’s basically a tombmobile.
Wow holy shit. So if you get submerged it’s just straight up a death sentence. Just when you think they can’t get worse…
I would not expect US auto regulations to improve for at least 3.5 years, minimum.
At this point I don’t know why anyone is buying those death-traps. For me any benefit from the self-driving feature is outweighed by the safety and poor build quality issues.
Take a look at comma.ai and openpilot to see whether your car is compatible. I’ve put about 100k miles on my comma running on my Honda Civic. Then you get a working car that’s not a deathtrap and improved self driving features.
I recently got a Volkswagen with adaptive cruise control, and I’m absolutely in love with it. Never needed the car to fully drive itself, that’s what public transport is for…
You’re not missing anything on the self driving side… Teslas only use cameras, so can never and will never actually be self-driving. Not competently, anyways.
I don’t know why anyone is buying those death-traps.
I’ve got good news, then! Fewer and fewer people are buying the illegal immigrant’s dangerous and overpriced swastikar, with new buyers dropping and trade-ins rising every day as public support for the emerald mine nepo baby nazi dwindles daily.
Instead they’re buying F150s and the like that are just as dangerous to everyone else on or near the road.
Because risk is statistically low and fuel cost savings are more tangible than believing you’re going to crash, let alone die. Humans are not logical. We know most conservatives don’t believe in EVs and outright liberals don’t want to support Musk, so who keeps buying them? Despite the reports of slumping sales, my area is continually renewing them despite being deeply blue. There’s another category: the real silent majority. The apathetic majority that’s being selfish and diminishing the weight of their actions.
“Selfish” implies they somehow gain something by purchasing one of these death traps.
Minimal fuel and maintenance fees. Flashy iPad in the dash. Quiet ride. Pretty good acceleration. I say fuck Tesla at this point because Elon just couldn’t stay quiet and just couldn’t stay reasonable with the product, but Tesla is the brand that put EVs Into the common household.
You need to grab the ripcord with your right hand, conveniently placed above the heart, and thrust it forward and up.
Cope cord.
In the context: “In case of smoke, give a yank on the old Cope Rope, and hope!”
Worship a Nazi get cooked in a oven. Justice is always served. Thank God, all men die.
