Numerous Tesla owners have said they’ve been stuck inside their EVs after the cars suddenly lost power.
YouTuber Tom Exton claimed that his Tesla Model Y ordered him to pull over before it suddenly lost power and left him unable to exit.
Exton followed the instructions for the manual release to open the door, but he said this “somehow broke the driver’s window.”
The ability to open a car door mechanically, from both inside and outside, should always be obvious, without having to find any instructions.
Yeah, how is this not illegal? This seems really dangerous in the event of a crash.
Who cares if it’s legal…… the Muskinator thinks it’s ‘cool’ 😎
It’s no different than a steering wheel and brakes. It doesn’t matter if there’s some advanced electronics augmenting (or even controlling) those systems: there need to be a bomb-proof mechanical linkage as a backup.
I don’t see why critical controls like that – if you even want to make them automatic – can’t have manual and automatic modes coupled.
If you lose power steering, you can still steer a vehicle, though you’re going to have to use a lot more muscle.
i agree. and this isnt just a tesla thing. plenty of other manufacturers are going this route, tesla might be the worst though especially the 3/y rear seat release. when the i8 was released i watched a video on youtube where a salesman and a tech were showing the car off. the tech mentioned that in training they kept breaking the emergency release inside the car. if a tech cant get out in training then how the fuck is anyone supposed to use it in a real emergency?
I imagine firemen/EMS/Cops are going to get annoyed with all the motorized door handles and just start breaking windows when ever they’re responding to something.
Absolutely. If your car is on fire, you shouldn’t be digging around looking for a latch, you should be pulling that handle and exiting in seconds. This design is going to kill people.
The number of automotive interfaces that we need to start strictly regulating because of trendy bullshit is getting fucking stupid.
A car door handle should be a mechanical device that’s plainly obvious to anyone who’s used a door handle, like, ever.
If phones are too dangerous to use while driving, then so is a fucking tablet glued to the dashboard.
I shouldn’t need a camera to use reverse, just quit adding blind spots.
A steering wheel should be just that — a wheel.
Blinker control should be a stalk pointing to the driver’s side door and self cancel.
And so on…
Funny thing about reverse cameras, they became a safety standard and requirement since 2020. Too many toddlers getting run over because you can’t see when they run behind the car below deck, even in an old car with a low trunk.
im not against backup cams and sensors. they are useful. to me the amount of aids for stupidity needs to go away. instead of having people, ya know, learn to look where they are going they just merge over and if the car doesnt yell at them theyre oblivious to whatever is around them.
I shouldn’t need a camera to use reverse, just quit adding blind spots.
The last time I used the backup camera in my car, I misjudged the distance to the car behind me and hit it, doing $1000 worth of damage. Never again. I look behind me now like I used to.
Cameras don’t have depth perception.
Blinker control should be a stalk pointing to the driver’s side door and self cancel.
Curious on your opinion where it should go on right wheel drive cars (and no, I don’t think converting the population of a whole country to “fix” it is realistic). I’ve seen it on both sides and it’s somewhat funny to rediscover.
That’s why I said “pointing to the driver’s side door”.
On LHD cars, the stalk is on the left. On RHD cars, the stalk is on the right.
on RHD cars it depends on the market. Japan has it on the right, UK―on the left. It’s a mess.
Oh really? I didn’t know that. I’ve only driven Japanese RHD cars, they all had the indicator stalk on the right side of the wheel. The number of times I turned switched on the wipers before turning…
I don’t know if that’s a tesla thing, or just cars in general these days (as I have an old vehicle and don’t ride in many others), but not having a fucking manual door opener seems really, really dumb.
it’s over engineering at it’s finest. Also included is the motorized pop-out door handles.
So the pop out handles on evs make a little sense. The goal is to reduce wind drag as much as possible. At least on mine (not a Tesla) you can still interact with the handle without the car exposing it.
Not having a manual way to open from the inside? No way in hell is that ok.
The wind drag on the handles is so negligible youd see a larger performance boost simply washing the bugs off the surface.
Cars aren’t moving fast enough that such short protrusions really matter.
It isn’t until cars start getting to race speeds that aerodynamic forces become … important.
Does it reduce drag? Yes. Is it smart to do so? Not so much. This is like all the cars that pulled out spares to get under the Obama era mpg requirements. Does it increase mileage? Sure. Is it smart to do so?
No. Wind drag on handles is most certainly not negligible. Even small protrusions on an otherwise smooth surface can have a significant effect. That effect is hard to model - you can’t just eyeball it.
Drag is proportional to windspeed squared.
Aero matters to fucking cyclists. It absolutely 100% matters to motor vehicles, especially in the context of EV range anxiety.
Just don’t fucking dunning-kruger, FFS. Surely you realise that automotive engineers have specific education that you don’t have. I don’t mind you being wrong, it’s the arrogance that pisses me off.
There’s only a small handful of cars that have primarily electronic door handles. Teslas are the worst because opening the door without power is very different than opening it with power and sometimes breaks the window. I think it was Mercedes or someone who has a power lock but the manual release is part of the same lever, you just pull it out farther.
Also wasn’t there a famous video of BMW showing how to mechanically perform every task on their all electric sports car? From car doors to hood releases to way more niche things 99.9999% of people will never use or even know exists?
It was the I8. The techs were talking about all the little things you can do to break stuff on the car because of how insanely designed it all was. The techs kept breaking the door releases, and you need to jam screwdrivers in the hinge for the hood which requires at least two people to open to avoid breaking or deforming it.
This is textbook bad engineering.
My Toyota has this thing called a door handle
Heh, peasants with their ancient car doors. It doesn’t count as a car until you unlock it with your fingerprint and credit card information and bash your head four times on the roof while getting in.
I don’t normally use the word “literally”, but… Teslas are literally death traps. Their door releases are all extremely hidden and impossible to locate if you haven’t been trained to find them. It’s like they are trying to kill people.
Woah, buddy don’t think like that, let me reset that neural link for you.
Have a nice day.
The Model 3 owner’s manual states that “only the front doors are equipped with a manual door release.”
Well clearly anyone in the rear could just go out the front doors. And there’s absolutely no conceivable way that would ever not be possible, right?
Huh, this must be new? My Model 3 and S both have rear hardware manual open methods.
The Model 3 one is so easy to access that most of my passengers used it instead of the button.
There’s a little hole next to the electric door handle where you can poke a straightened paper clip… oh oops, that’s the cd player, not the door.
Reason #286 to never own a god damned stupid Tesla.
Cars are required to have manual releases by law; it’s just shitty how Tesla appears to be skirting those rules by hiding these manual releases behind inconvenient placements and locations…which is going to get people killed someday when one of these damn things catch fire.
The new Lexus RX has this door tech as well. I couldn’t open the door in the showroom.
Walked out of Lexus right away.
I feel like these people are incredibly disingenuous. If I’m in a hot car and want to make an exaggerated example out of what I think is bad design, I act like these people. If I’m in a hot car, stuck and panicking, I’m thinking about how much a window costs for about half a minute, and then I break a window.
It’s actually not very easy to break car windows out from inside a car without a tool. You can do it, but it’s harder than you’d think (like, I wouldn’t want to try doing it in a car which fell into a lake or something).
I guess I just assumed most people have one of those window breaking tools that cost like 5 dollars.
You need power to open the door? Every day I learn more and more how piss poor the design is for these cars.
No, there’s a manual release. It’s normally hidden but it’s there in case of the battery dying.
I had a car in my 20s that trapped me inside, because the door handle broke and the window wouldn’t roll down.
Apparently Tesla is making cars as crappy as my 1985 Monte Carlo I had when I was 21.
I’m a robotics and mechatronics engineer in the automotive manufacturing space.
A few things I will never bend on, no matter how good the tech gets: Mechanical braking system Mechanical link from steering wheel to tires Manual door locks and handles Mechanical trunk/fuel door releases
Things I prefer to be mechanical: Fuel pump Carburetor Timing
Personally I drive a 1970 c20. It has a carb with throttle body injection, and electric pump with mechanical back up. An HEI distributor with electronic advance that still works if the electronics fail. I love the convenience of tech but it needs a robust back up.
Why on god’s green earth would any engineer prefer carburation to fuel injection?
