Tesla owner asks $1m in Model X fiery crash with Falcon Wing doors not opening
electrek.co
electrek.co
Tesla has been proven safer in crashes, and less likely to be in a crash in the first place. The driver crashed into a stationary object, sue the driver, not the car company.
The "reasonable expectation that a door will open if it is not visibly damaged" applies no matter what the underlying mechanism of the door is.
> but thats an RTFM problem, not a car problem.
Even if people did read the manuals for their cars- which no one does- people frequently forget things like this in emergency situations when they need to get out quickly. Hence things like big red signs for fire doors. Passing the responsibility onto them for doors that don't work is absurd.
In this case, the passengers were able to display adaptability and get out, but had they been physically disabled or had there been clutter inside the vehicle, the two front doors and rear door might not have been viable options.
That these people were able to escape before the battery fire is, of course, a good ending, but it's not a positive statement on the engineering decisions made.
More apt would be "The main doors are manual, but the electric garage doors will not function" ... which is actually a common case in buildings...
I'm curious if we're only seeing these stories because Tesla is such a hot topic.
At least the car world is more sane than the aviation world. Here's a fun little side story.
Piper aircraft company - they make small general aviation planes - have been out of business a few times from being sued into the ground over absurd stuff. Here's the best one...
Drunk guy shows up to a glider airfield. Hes been banned from said field already, but hes drunk so who cares, right? SO he jumps in a plane, a piper, and starts it up. Owner of the field parks a truck on the runway to prevent a drunk person from taking off... drunk guy proceeds to attempt to take off with predictable results... smashes into the truck.
Then he sues piper and wins enough to bankrupt the company. Because the plane, which was made in the 40s, did not have a shoulder harness, just a lap belt. Because there are laws that say if someone is hurt in something you make, you are liable. This applies to cars too, but the absurdity of it seems to prevent it from taking hold there... Thats why aside from Cessna, there are very few plane manufacturers on the GA level anymore who deliver fully built planes. Most now, sell "kits" which you can assemble yourself (with their help) on-site at their facility. This way, you build 51% of your aircraft, and its not their liability.
This also leads to some crazy stuff. Like, pilots who have done a 51% build and a few years later becoming medically disqualified to fly, DESTROY their plane rather than selling due to the liability since THEY made it...
Gotta love the world we live in sometimes...
Ralph Nader made a name for himself writing a book about car companies selling death-traps.
This is how the industry changes — Tesla is not the first.
Or maybe their owners, paying $100K or so a car, feel a little more entitled to receive a safe car for all that dosh?
Does liability law sometimes cause bad collateral damage (like you mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14187563 with general aviation)? Yes. But that doesn't mean that every lawsuit over a vehicle is inappropriate.
Tesla vehicles are safer than most other vehicles but that isn't an excuse for sub-par design around emergency egress. This story have been "my Tesla crashed and has battery fire but the conveniently-located door override nevertheless let me get out fast" -- I'm disappointed because Tesla could have done better.
Honestly, this just sounds like a money grab to me.
Um, where was the driver? Did he/she flee the scene or something? Killed in the crash?
Do you expect everyone that rides in the back of your car to have read your owner's manual? I realize in this case they also happen to be the owners, but I don't think that's the point here.
Hiding a manual release BEHIND a speaker isn't exactly obvious. I have no opinion on if they deserve $1 million, but I do think Tesla needs take function over form in this case and make the manual override a lot easier to find.
That's a rather misleading statement, given that you acknowledge that the people in the back of the car are actually the owners.
And yes, I do expect the owners of the car to be at least aware of what to do in an emergency. The fact that they didn't bother to educate themselves about emergency procedures doesn't mean they get to blame the car manufacturer.
There's a reason why all emergency actuation mechanisms are painted bright red and super visible in all forms of transport from cars to airplanes to buildings. That reason is you cannot reasonably expect all passengers to be intimate with the safety measures, nor can you even expect well versed passengers to be thinking clearly in an amergency situation.
Tesla can certainly expect to get their asses handed to them by various federal regulators across the globe for hiding the 'get me out of the burning death trap' lever behind a god dammed speaker grill.
The no-power mechanical release cable is hidden and not even properly documented.
A reasonable person who has not pored over every page of the instruction manual or the first responder guide would not think to try to remove the speaker grill when they're sitting on a battery fire.
It's absolutely unreasonable to expect every single person who sits in the back seat to have been given a bloody briefing of "oh, in case the 12V power dies, the door won't work, you'll have to dismantle the car a bit to pull an override cable".
It's documented in the physical owner's manual, and in the emergency guide. It appears the only place it isn't documented is the online manual.
> A reasonable person who has not pored over every page of the instruction manual or the first responder guide would not think to try to remove the speaker grill when they're sitting on a battery fire.
No, but a reasonable person who buys a car like this should at least skim the manual once, looking for info on what to do in an emergency, precisely because in an emergency they won't have time to look up such info.
- it need not be the owner that's trapped
- it could be a child that can't read yet
- what's in the manual will be forgotten during an accident panic is a very bad time to remember complex details
- you don't have time to think in an emergency situation
And so on. All in all a beautiful death trap is not something people would buy either.
What ever method you choose should satisfy those conditions. If you can't come up with a viable alternative to big red handle (which is the accepted norm for emergency only door openers the world over) then maybe you simply should let go of your fancy door design.
But other manufacturers than Tesla seem to be able to make this work just fine so at a guess I'm not arguing against human nature, merely against you. Note that making a car door work has been a solved problem since roughly the 1930's.
This is not the first time someone's been unable to open a car door after a high-speed crash.
In fact, nothing in the article even tells us whether the emergency open handle would have worked, or whether the problem was the car frame was deformed enough to jam the doors.
Nothing in the article relates whether or not they ate ice-cream either. But the fact is that the door did not open because of power failure and that the handle was placed in such a way that a mechanical option to open the door was obscured from the passengers. if the handle would have been exposed and the door would have been jammed you would have a point. But hiding behind information that doesn't matter either way is a pretty weak defense.
I'll leave it at that. Hopefully if and when the time comes and you find yourself in an accident in a model X you and your passengers will remember to look behind the speaker grille.
You completely missing my point isn't moving the goalposts, and it's kind of offensive to have you dismiss my comment like that.
> But the fact is that the door did not open because of power failure
No, we don't know that. The article didn't say it was because of a power failure. It just said they didn't open. That was the whole point of my comment, that you're making an assumption as to why it didn't open, but the article didn't say why it didn't open, which means it could very well have been due to a cause that would cause all other car doors to also fail to open (namely, the frame bending).
So, 'all other car doors' (of this particular car) opened just fine, it is just the gull wing doors that did not open making it rather hard to believe that the chassis was that deformed.
And even if the chassis was deformed that would be one reason more to provide for some kind of emergency escape measure to avoid being trapped in a car which is a very bad place to be after an accident and cars do get into accidents every now and then.
Why I said you were moving the goalposts: first you argued at length that aesthetics were the main reason this problem couldn't be solved, then you went for the fact that the doors might have jammed without any evidence for that, in fact with strong evidence to the contrary. Since this was a head on collision you'd expect the front of the car to have taken the brunt of the impact and that if the front doors were jammed chassis deformation could be assumed to the point where the rear doors would be jammed as well.
But given the front is fine the rear should have opened. And if deformation of the car is possible where in a frontal collision the front doors will still open just fine but the rear doors will not then that's a huge design flaw.
Note how the article says the electrical release button did not work, that's pretty logical but probably not what the passengers expected.
So, we can go looking for complex explanations but really simple ones exist: electrical failure, quite common after an accident, and a really good thing too because you don't want to have an electrical fire such as the one in the article on top of a car accident, doors don't open, emergency release invisible to the point of non-existence -> problem.
Fortunately the people in the car had the quickness of mind and sufficient agility to try the front doors fast enough to get out, if not the story would have ended quite differently.
Some blogger predicted this could happen by the way:
http://www.thedrive.com/new-cars/1540/will-the-tesla-model-x...
I wasn't moving the goalposts. I was pointing out that you were trying to argue for an untenable solution to a problem without actually having evidence that that was the real problem in the first place.
Note that Tesla would be absolutely horrified to learn that this accident did not allow the rear doors to be opened mechanically because they were jammed as that would indicate a structural un-soundness of their chassis design.
Note that EURO NCAP makes fairly explicit mention of whether or not doors can be opened after an accident and that that passenger compartment deformation is a huge factor in the rating a car gets.
Electrical problem + making a nice handle on the door for emergency release: fixable. Rear doors jammed after mild front impact -> back to the chassis drawing board, massive recall.
The article states that the rear-seat occupants "managed to exit through the front door" -- with no mention of any problems with opening the front doors. I think this means that the front doors opened just fine; likely due to the reinforcements around the doors/pillars, as shown on page 19 of http://assets.teslastatic.com/2016_Model_X_Emergency_Respons... doing their job.
As detailed in this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14188425 , the problem isn't the visibility of the handle, it's that speaker-grill Bowden cable release was, afaict, never meant as an emergency mechanism, it was simply meant for service/maintenance tasks.
The door release cable is not even denoted as an emergency procedure so it is quite possible that they could have "skim[mmed] the manual once" and missed it.
All information from which will be promptly forgotten once the car catches fire. Clearly label it on the actual mechanism, there's plenty of prior art should Tesla need help with this.
I used to pay accident insurance. A serious car wreck can wreck your finances for the rest of your life, leaving you too maimed to work (or to make as much as you used to/should), with a pile of medical bills and ongoing expenses due to lasting health effects, etc. A million dollars really isn't all that much money for such a scenario.
But, hey, maybe you would like to give me your dominant arm for, say, $10,000 and then spend the rest of your life contemplating if you made good money for it or if it cost you more than that over the long haul. (Or, we can just leave this here as a thought experiment, since I don't actually have $10,000 and don't actually want your arm. That is just the amount of money loss of a limb was typically worth on the policies I used to pay claims on.)
You only know as much as the article states. From my experience paying claims, I don't believe that in any way qualifies you to make any meaningful judgments here.
Smoke inhalation can cause serious and long lasting damage. Being trapped in the car because they can't open the door can be a means to worsen that damage. Such damage is not visible to the naked eye. It is a better predictor of death in case of fire injury than the more visible burns.
But don't let logic or anything get in the way of your opinions.
> In the open letter, the owner says that she suffered a broken nose and a severe cut to her lower lip that needed a dozen stitches, but the driver got the worst of it. She wrote that “he was hospitalized for more than 40 days with internal injuries and fractures”.
> Beyond the physical injuries, she added: “it brought us more serious mental harm, after the accident and still today, I often have nightmares about being burned to death inside the Tesla Model X.
> It’s apparently what led her to ask Tesla for 8 million Chinese yuan (~$1 million) in compensation, which Tesla China is refusing to pay, but they are still investigating the accident and collaborating with the local authorities
No mention of smoke inhalation, even though it documents the other injuries, and it explicitly mentions the mental harm angle, which is the only possible way to try and pin any of this on Tesla.
Also, the car caught on fire after they got out. It wasn't on fire while they were still in the seat. So the whole "smoke inhalation" bit has no basis in reality.
The consequences of soft tissue injuries are often not immediately noticeable. Accidental injury lawyers generally want to get involved as soon as possible, in part to try to document things that might not be obvious.
I am not arguing that these people should get a million dollars. I am only arguing that it is ridiculous to claim that their suit is merely a money grab and has no validity whatsoever. There is a difference.
I am okay with this being sorted out in a court of law. Whether you think they are merely being selfish or not, lawsuits of faulty equipment are one of the ways that constructive change gets moved forward. It matters little whether they just wanted the money or thought about the big picture. It matters little whether or not they explicitly express that in the press.
You think you can decide this case based on the contents of a single article on the internet. That in no way fits with my professional experience, where we needed substantial documentation to make a legally binding decision for certain benefits. So, no, I am not impressed with your armchair opinions here.
I'm not sure if these people deserve compensation but there should be a way to open the doors manually without relying on hydraulics.
It's true that it exists, but its intentionally well-hidden, and if you were in a flaming car you probably wouldn't think to rip off the speakers to try to find a latch.
[1]: http://assets.teslastatic.com/2016_Model_X_Emergency_Respons... page 24
See airplane doors for a comparison: http://c8.alamy.com/comp/DK7AW8/airplane-door-cabin-door-on-...
Of course, there is no need to have such "ugly" or big notices, but certainly a small text "Remove cover here and pull lever to open" is doable.
However, these are not an inherent issue; it's certainly possible to store energy (compressed gas, auxiliary battery, springs, pyrotechnic charge) to provide a redundant opening system in case the main power supply is offline. Using stored energy to activate emergency safety apparatus (hi, airbags) is not a new thing in passenger vehicles. Hell, some cars have pyrotechnic cable-cutters that isolate all non-essential 12V/HV circuits with explosives milliseconds after a severe collision are detected (to avoid post-crash fire/heating and electronics damage).
To solve a eminently predictable post-crash problem with "take off a speaker grill that's on the floor (right next to a battery fire) and pull hard on a Bowden cable" is simply not acceptable and the state of the art in post-crash systems indicates that Tesla could have done much better.
So to cater for an emergency scenario, make everything simple, obvious, and wherever possible, dependent on muscle memory. The emergency release should depend on whatever mechanism is already used for that door (no idea what it is now), but more - if it is a latch, have some mechanism where if you pull the latch much harder it becomes a mechanical device that opens the door. In the case of these wing doors that move up, make the whole door drop off the hinges or something. In the case of an electric button, make it so that if you depress it even more, again it becomes a mechanical device. etc. WTF, Tesla?
That has to be a major oversight, especially for people able to afford a driver it’s unrealistic to expect they’d read the manual (they’ve got better to do with their time), or to expect that they give the one single physical copy they have to a driver (instead, usually, the driver gets a PDF on a kindle – you might replace the driver a few months later again, and might not get the manual back otherwise).
So it’s not surprising that the passengers and the driver didn’t know about that.
> First of all, the lives of the owner and passengers were not threaten.
Reminds me of Tesla's section to the decapitated driver: "A human wouldn't have seen the truck either" or the unroll.me response.
Seems like their life was in danger. How about, "Sorry to learn what happened" and to look at changing the accessibility of the manual release. This is why we have consumer safety regulations.
I don't understand the mindset where commenters chime in with what they'd do in the situation (most of the time they've read the manual front to back, they have a dozen gadgets in their cargo pants for just this occasion).
Isn't it more worthwhile to discuss what the expectation would be for the average consumer? Imagining someone like my grandmother in that situation tends to set expectations well.
Apparently, the owner of the vehicle couldn't be bothered to read the manual. Oh well.
That would be like hiding a fire alarm or exitinguisher behind a painting and placing a small sign underneath indicating it's presence, hardly useful in a real emergency unless people are informed.
This is more accurately described as a manual backup since you apparently have to remove a speaker grill to access it.