Tesla fire kills man because door handles wouldn’t open, lawsuit alleges (2019)
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The doors are electronic. The front doors have a mechanical override simply by pulling the door release lever further than usual. That's OK.
For the rear doors, there's an emergency cable to pull on at the very bottom of the door[1].
I was 11 when my dad crashed our car, at night at a decent speed. When we stopped moving, the car next to ours was already on fire, and I'm told ours also caught fire, although I didn't notice it at the time. My dad's (driver's) door was blocked, so he had to clamber across my younger sister in the front passenger seat. I unbuckled my younger brother (age 5), opened his door a bit, but had to kick it to get it to open sufficiently -- it was also badly dented in the collision.
If we'd had a Tesla, would you expect 11 year old me to know to "look below the seats for the carpet flap, find the little plastic tab, grab it and pull it to the side" -- and to be able to kick open the door while pulling that tab, since the side of the car is smashed in?
(We were all uninjured; some people in other cars had broken bones.)
A random person doesn't stand a chance.
Even if you know it as a trivia, it is likely that in an extremely stressful situation you will revert to doing what you have been doing all your life, but now with no effect.
A lot of airplane passanges die in crashes because they are unable to unbuckle the seat-belt (everyone is trained by cars to push on the button not pull the buckle).
Unbuckling airplane seatbelt is far easier then having secret door handle in the doors.
All for sake of form over function.
Most of what was once a "trivial" design decision has become computer-controlled beyond recognition.
A better standard fiber to premises standard would include a power connection, but that would greatly increase prices, too.
Indeed, it's almost caused by lazy thinking. If you need conditional behavior of a widget, the default is to reach for the almighty transistor, why spend more brain cells than that.
Yet... sometimes it's better to trigger your conditional behavior on some other physical phenominan (read: gas station nozzles[0])
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you want to design a door handle with specific behavior and you understand software and electronics well but mechanical design less so, you design an electronically actuated door handle and do all the features in software.
It's cheaper, too, honestly, because revising a software system is inherently cheaper than the design-manufacture-construct-test loop for mechanical design.
But, as automotive design advances out of the technical design stasis it's been in for decades due to the dominance/barriers to entry of the US car industry, there's going to be a need for more advanced rules regarding what needs to be manual/mechanical vs. fly by wire.
A similar regulatory regime already exists in aircraft design, which could be a guiding example.
More mechanical/moving parts increases risk and complexity, not reduces it. If something is misaligned or bends or breaks or even if it's just insufficiently lubricated, you're SOL. Solid state transistors are stupid reliable in comparison. Further, implementing more than two or three levels of conditional logic with mechanisms is prohibitively expensive, whereas you can have thousands of checks in a digital system practically for free. Finally, a mechanical system can only handle situations it is designed for, upgrades are difficult and sometimes impossible to implement. On the other hand digital logic is easily updated to deal with unforeseen issues.
Electricity is just as much a physical phenomenon as fluid flow or mechanical stress.
[Edit] I'm a mechanical engineer, no one should be any more enthusiastic about doing things mechanically than I am.
I love computers as much as anyone on this site, but I like mechanical things too. I much prefer mechanical locks to digital ones. Mechanical locks are extremely reliable and well made ones work for centuries. Whereas I wouldn't trust a modern fingerprint padlock at all - what if the sensor fails? What if the batteries run out? What if moisture gets inside and corrodes the circuit board? One of the main jobs of a lock is to open when I need it to, and I just don't trust battery powered locks to do that.
That's the sticking point. People tend not to think of mechanical systems as systems full of many components any one of which can fail, but they are.
In the case of the gas nozzle, you have the orifice for the airflow which can get blocked, you have the diaphragm which can break, you have the connection to the lever which can sever, you have the lever itself which can bind. Critically if it does fail, it fails catastrophically - gas spills everywhere.
On the other hand consider a system employing a capacitive level sensor. When the sensor comes into contact with fluid, the dialectric constant changes and thus the voltage drop across the sensor increases to the point the valve will close itself. If anything goes wrong, say you lose power or a wire breaks or someone physically rips the nozzle off, the voltage still decreases below the cutoff threshold so the valve still closes - it fails safe.
People like mechanical systems because they are easy to visualize, but that's not the same as being simple or safe. At the same time, most of our experience with electronics is with low cost consumer electronics where the price of failure is low and there is strong financial incentive to use cheap components with short life expectancies in configurations that aren't fail-safe, so we tend to associate electronics with being unreliable.
But on a fundamental level, the force stopping two gears from passing through each other is exactly the same as the one producing a current when you apply a voltage to a piece of copper.
I think what a lot of people are forgetting here is that in the vast majority of situations you don't want random people to be able to easily open up your doors from outside. What failed here was not the door handle - which operated exactly as it should under normal circumstances, but the emergency override that should unlock the car when the airbags deploy. However, it's completely reasonable for some systems to fail when you crash at extremely high speeds - you can't make things indestructible. I see no evidence that a mechanical failsafe would have performed better.
That entirely depends on where you live! If you're in a valley and the water source is up in the mountain, gravity will do the job... but if you're living (in terms of height) above the water source, you'll likely run out of tap water very soon - depending if your water utility provider has installed backup diesel generators on-site.
However, now that I have a private well, yes, it kind of sucks when power goes out and water doesn't work. I've got 40 gallons of hot water in the heater that I can drain, and between 10 and 30 gallons in the pressure tank in the crawlspace. More than enough to draw some off for drinking and cooking, and a few buckets for pouring in the tanks of (gravity-operated!) toilets.
Speaking of cooking, another utility that's surprisingly operable in a power outage is natural gas. I can cook on my gas stove (but not in my electric oven), heat my house with my gas fireplace insert (but not my forced-air furnace), and heat water with my continuous-pilot water heater (but not fill it with my well pump) because the buried natural gas pipeline is always, always at 2 PSI.
Why premium products are the ones using worse control system is beyond me.
Nothing similar has happened with the hood or door handles...yet.
I infer that the driver was unconscious and bystanders/first responders outside the car were unable to open the doors. There are no claims that the internal handles were defective, they only complain that the futuristic, flush external door handles that are intended to detect key presence plus an approaching hand and extend when you reach for them were inoperable. However, there are no details in the article on whether the doors were even unlocked or airbags deployed. Regulations require that the doors unlock after the airbag deploys, most manufacturers also turn off the ignition and fuel pump (in an internal-combustion vehicle); I expect that this routine would include extending the handles in a Tesla. However, Tesla handles getting stuck is a pretty common problem, it seems the standard response is to pry them open with a credit card or similar object. And typically it's the electric actuator and slide mechanism that jams, so other doors would have worked, in this case it sounds like the power to the door actuators was gone due to the crash so no door would open.
But car doors getting crushed in and becoming inoperable is a common problem, and the standard solution is a glass breaking tool or other heavy/sharp object. Had the door latches been crushed and stuck closed in the attorney's recommended "Chevy pickup", regardless of whether the handles were accessible, the police officer who responded first would have been expected to break a window. It sounds like the first responder got stuck in the problem-solving process when their plan to open the doors using the handles didn't work and they didn't know what to do. That's easy to identify from my armchair, but I'm sure it would be different when you've got an unconscious guy in a smoking Tesla in front of you, and certainly is no good resolution for the widow.
I would think that depends on the country. Every country has different car regulations, there is no universal car regulatory body.
First responders werent paramedics or firefighters. You'd expect a random bystander to risk their life breaking into a flaming car?
Burning to death is such a horrible way to go, what empathetic person could resist trying to help?
So I can see that folks may be paralyzed by indecision, even by the intensity of their feelings. Ok, 'normal' people want to help but probably don't because of a lifetime of holding back.
"But Awan survived the crash, and he could have escaped the smoke and fire, too, Grossman said — if only the police officer who arrived on the scene could have opened the car’s doors."
If you regularly drive more than one kind of car you might notice that other road users treat you quite differently depending on which one you're driving.
But this Model S is very unlikely to have had that, and it sounds like there was a policeman on the scene. Surely the officer would have access to something that he could have used to break the glass? I've read a few articles about this lawsuit and I have yet to see a clear answer as to why that wasn't the solution.
It makes me wonder if the "doors wouldn't open" part is just a spurious claim and the lawsuit is really about the post-crash fire.
Mechanical mechanisms are fragile - anything strong enough to survive impacts at highway speeds at an arbitrary angle is going to be too bulky to move manually without the assistance of yet another fragile mechanism. You can't design unsinkable ships, at some point you need life boats.
Realistically, we're going to have a tough time finding out what dangers we'll have from moving from analogue dashboards to digital ones. Feels a bit like when we got rid of the incandescent bulb before LED bulbs were really ready.
In this case:
> That’s because the car’s retractable door handles, which are supposed to “auto-present” when they detect a key fob nearby, malfunctioned and first responders weren’t able to open the doors and save Awan, the suit alleges.
It didn't matter. Clearly Awan was unconscious or unable to extricate himself. As you said, most cars auto-lock the doors. If the doors were locked (we don't know from this article), it wouldn't matter if the handles "auto presented" themselves or not. They wouldn't be able to open them from outside the car. If the doors were unlocked, well that's a different story.
He also hit 3 other cars, 2 trees, and rammed into a stone wall.
I'd say his family got a damn good lawyer, and by that I mean shameless.
There's a reason you're not allowed to have pure drive-by-wire either, requiring mechanical connection to brake and steering.
While doors are generally less of a concern, but it's still nice to know that the door handle works when the electronics do not. Such as when there is a fire. Braking a window is harder than you might think if you don't carry a dedicated tool for it.
(And no, while this guy was a criminal, that does not mean all fires are by criminals, nor that criminals should burn to death)
Sure, if you are going 5x speed limit and then crash, I wouldn't blame anyone but the driver for that, I could also understand that it could be reasonable to expect a fire in that situation.
But this article is about the doors, if you are unable to open the door without a working battery, that is indeed a problem...
Two teenagers in that one.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Emergency-Cutter-Window-...
I note that most buses and trains have window hammers (or some other way to break the windows), usually several per vehicle.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073JCMTW2/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_fabc...
I don't think any car company or stranger can answer that for you.
Most people don't have non-expired fire extinguishers in their house either (in the US).
Having said that, GP made a rather disgusting comment where he is blaming a dead person for not having a non-mandatory emergency window breaker in a car compartment.
From the article description the handles don't appear to be fault-tolerant and should certainly be investigated.
Most people don't have a hammer / seat belt cutter. It is not a required piece of equipment. People aren't trained in its use. There is no expectation that a standard driver (at least in the US) should be able to use this tool. This is Tesla's issue, not the drivers.
See the picture on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_hammer
(The wording in the Wikipedia article is not clear. Do American trains really not have these?)
It may be arbitrary but I did want to point out Teslas are not environmentally conscious, they're luxury vehicles [0] In order for electric vehicles to be anything but luxury their power sources will need to be environmentally sustainable and friendly as well.
Home automation, which I used to take gratuitous part of, is also a luxury. I figured out pretty quickly that for every physical interface I replaced, I still needed a manual override. For example: I could have eliminated wall switches when I was seeking to automate my lights based on presence and time. Instead, I chose some Zigbee wall switches that used an internal relay. Even if the house turned the lights off, you could still walk over to the wall and turn the light on. In infrastructure automation I generally have the same sort of concept just for different reasons. I imagine Tesla needs something similar.
Edit: Just did some further reading and manual overrides are present in Teslas. It's safe to say Dr Awan didn't know how to use it, or didn't think to use it in a panic. Education and accessibility sound key here.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2016/03/teslas-electric-cars-might-not...