Alarming, and I’ve just watched a video about how to get out of mine in an emergency.
However, presumably this predicament could apply to many/most modern cars which rely on electrics/software more than ever, and isn’t particular to Teslas?
You should not have to watch a video or read a manual to open a freaking car door.
👆 That right there.
The fuck are people supposed to do who don’t even own the car?
👆👆 And that even more so.
We have literally centuries of knowledge of human-machine interaction. We know what works and what doesn't. We know the importance of getting this right from watching what would be a literal lake of blood if put into one location before us. And one of those things that works is making sure the emergency tools are very obvious and in our faces. The rear door instructions for the Model Y alone are a horror show for anybody who has ever been in a crisis before. And then on top of that not all Model Ys have such a latch anyway.
Be confused as hell when the Uber driver doesn't speak English.
Or be me, someone who noticed the weird ass flat handles on the picture and googled how to open the door during the 11 minutes it took for the driver to arrive.
I consider the electronic door handles to be a violation of functional safety ISO 26262. I would think that in a fire situation the doors electronics are pretty unlikely to work. The manual release is not a good control because a reasonable person isn't necessarily going to know it exists. I work in the automotive industry and most organisations I have worked with are big old manufacturers and they think extremely long and hard about this kind of thing. Sadly I doubt Tesla cares so much about ISO standards.
And thus should require backup batteries isolated from the main power bus of the vehicle, which would be so cost prohibitive the entire idea is made redundant.
Uhhh...no? There's plenty of stuff that fails open with no battery backup. It's called fail safe. When power fails and the door remains locked is called fail secure.
It exists but anything that passively draws power would not normally be preferred for automotive. However with EVs it might not be such a big deal due to the enormous battery.
Tesla did the cost analysis and decided the lawsuits from a few deaths were less than the profit to be made by not making safe doors.
I think it's much worse than that - I think it's just because they (well, Musk) thought it would be "cool" to have everything automatic and just ignored or pushed aside any safety arguments.
Not defending the decision. I think it's bad design.
That said, supposedly the reason is that the doorframes do not run along the top of the window, allegedly to reduce the weight of the car. Because of this, the window itself has to form the seal, which could potentially damage the window if the door is mechanically opened. The electronic button lowers the window as it opens the door in order to reduce the risk.
Again, I don't support this reasoning. I'm just sharing it.