Numerous Tesla owners say they’ve been trapped inside their EVs after they lost power.::Numerous Tesla owners say they have been trapped inside their EVs after they lost power.Teslas come with manual door releases, but they can be hard to find
The manual door release can be tricky to find unless you’ve combed through your car’s owner’s manual.
Absolute horseshit. Practically every person who gets out of my car for the first time goes for the manual handle. I have to make a point to tell them to use the button.
This is how the BMW a friend owns works, and it’s not an EV. The unlock button in the driver’s seat just stops working if the car is off.
How do I know this? I decided to stay in the car while my friend went to go get something, and it auto-locked as he walked away. After about 5 minutes of trying everything I could think of to get out (including attempting to climb into the boot, which was too small for anything except a malnourished child to fit through), he came back and unlocked it.
There is no manual way to unlock the door from the inside. I checked the driver’s manual. It says it’s impossible to do without “special knowledge” and does not provide any pointers on how to do so. The friend asked a guy at the BMW place after a service how to unlock it from the inside, and he said “oh, yeah, there’s no way to do that,” and laughed it off.
Previous BMW models weren’t designed like this. I can’t imagine what they’ll do to the next generation…
This sounds like a very dangerous design.
BMW thinks so too!
How idiotic. Manual interior trunk releases were mandated for a reason. BMW designers saw that and said “hold my beer!”
How is that even legal? It sounds like that is literally going to kill people.
A recent Corvette did kill its confused owner and his dog.
People… There are manual door handles right where you expect them to be. Why isn’t this in the title hmmmmmmm?
For the model S and X the handles look normal, but not for the model Y and 3. The handles for the model Y and 3 are in front of the window buttons, easy to miss. On top of that using the manual release handles for the model Y and 3 could possibly crack your window trim. Stupid, but true.
Try looking up the models they’re talking about in the article before assuming things hmmmmmmm?
But seriously, everyone should look up the emergency info for your vehicles. May you never need it, but it’s good to know. Like not all Tesla models have a back seat/trunk escape if you find yourself in a serious front end collision. Or how in the Model X you have to pry off the speaker grill to access the manual release wire.
I have a 3. Again, I have to tell people to use the button the first (and 2nd, and on) time they get out. They go right for the manual release which is where, as I said, you would expect.
My dad has a 3. I have no idea where that manual release is supposed to be
Next time you’re in the front seat take a wild guess.
Have they tried subscribing to Twitter Blue? As I understand it, it ‘unlocks’ the door feature…
/s
I am flabbergasted about how little some people know about cars.
In a discussion about a potentially mandatory hardware cutoff button for EVs after the accident in China:
- But that’s just an electric button! What is a button good for if the electronics fail?
Do you know what a hardware cutoff does?
- Could I press it accidentally?
Such button would be mounted somewhere you can see and easily reach but normally don’t have hands there, like the dashboard.
- What if I’m going 80 mph on a highway and the cutoff somehow activates?
Did you realize that you don’t actually stop dead when the motor is disconnected? You will start coasting, gradually slowing down (unless it’s downhill) and come to a halt in about a minute.
However, the software (or hardware, if the manufacturer is actually safety aware) will “notice” the cutoff and turn on brake lights (& hazards if they are separate), and inform you that you need to pull the button back up to reconnect the contacts. If you realize your mistake immediately, you can revert it in less time than it takes beginners to shift gears on some old cars (which is also a time when the motor is not engaged).- But how do I stop a rogue car if the button actually does not do it by itself?
Slamming the brakes all the way should mechanically engage the brake pads regardless of whether the electronics works. If not, the car is not road legal.
- Cars did not use to have this!
Do you know what the ignition key does? It physically prevents the motor from firing any further if it is pulled.
Stop complaining about mechanical overrides to electronic systems! Any software engineer will tell you that they’ll happily be able to pull the plug if their computer tries to kill them!
The brakes in a Tesla are move powerful than the motors. If the guy in China had actually been hitting the brakes, the car could have never reached 150kmh. The chance of a simultaneous failure of the mechanical brakes, the electrical interlocks and the drive software is FAR less likely than the chance the driver was pushing the wrong peddle.
The brakes in a Tesla are move powerful than the motors.
Maybe if you combine e-brakes and brake pads, I guess? Anyway, I agree that at >100 km/h, the brake pads should easily overpower the motor.
I hate to be the voice of reason here, but if you get inside a powerful device to pilot it you should at minimum read the directions first.
Are lots having this problem or just enough for this article?
I get that people could be more curious about their cars, but hiding an emergency release like some kind of hidden book on Hogwarts that you have to yank on seems like a dumb idea. Car doors have established design language, and if you break that design language it has to be pretty fucking obvious how to do the action your users were trained to do.
The manual door release is so hard to find that most time, passengers not knowing Tesla cars use them.
If you can’t find the door release, maybe you are too dumb to drive a 2 tons car with other humans.
Model X: If the power drops out, you can open the rear doors using a mechanical release found behind the speaker grille, which you need to remove from the vehicle’s door, the manual adds.
Ah yes, if I can’t get out of a car, my first thought would be to dismantle the speaker grille.
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_au/GUID-7A32EC01-A17E-42CC-A15B-2E0A39FD07AB.html
Really doesn’t look that hard to find… and who the fuck is getting into any car without knowing how to open it in case of an emergency lol.
Pretty stupid that there’s only a manual open for the front doors though, at least on the model 3.
Fact #648637 why Tesla is a bad car. It just feels very sloppy and badly engineered.
Excuse me? But I happen to enjoy taking off my speaker grill to pull my manual release lever to open the back doors. /s
the door handles are the definition of over-engineered
except when you need to get out of the car.
There are manual door handles right where you would expect them to be.
People are dumb.
if lots of people are having the same issue with the design, then it is the design that is dumb.
Knowing absolutely nothing about this situation, there are enough Teslas out there that dumb mistakes of every variety are going to happen. At a certain point you can’t work around every kind of stupid, some of them directly conflict with each other. Now, I personally think Teslas are over-engineered in some areas, but despite not ever having been inside one even I know they have electronic doors and and manual override.
Remember when Toyotas had a problem with spontaneous acceleration? The thing is, no, they didn’t. People were mixing up the brake and accelerator like they always do and somehow one incident made the news, and it became a trend.
I’ve already lost my enthusiasm for this discussion, but there you go. People be doing dumb things and you gotta ask what the acceptable dumb mistake rate is, because you will never completely eliminate it.
