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.
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.