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Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

It's important to remember that Teslas are equipped with a secondary manual door handle. You are able to open the door even if there is no power in the vehicle.

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Where is the secondary manual door handle?

It’s right where you would naturally expect a handle actually. To the point that people new to the car use it by mistake. Not the best design tbh.

But why have two different ways of unlocking the door, one automatic and one manual? Why not just one control for this one operation?

Coolness.

Sounds a little hot to me.

The automatic control lowers the window a few millimeters as the door opens to clear the trim. This design ensures a tight seal to eliminate wind noise.

If you use the manual control, it won’t lower the window, which can cause damage. It’s meant for emergencies.

My Toyota 86 has a manual door handle, and it will also automatically lower the window a little too.

> If you use the manual control, it won’t lower the window, which can cause damage.

On a Tesla. Other cars, mostly with similar frameless windows, have this same functionality and have had it for at least the last 15 years and they do so with mechanical releases.

There is absolutely to reason why a purely mechanical solution would be unable to lower the window. Heck, they can use the same engine/latch that's controlled electronically when using the manual handle.

A friend of mine with a model Y explained it to me like this: When "correctly" opening the door (electronically), the car lowers the window slightly first. This causes less wear and tear on the seals.

Honestly, the car has too many mechanical actuators for my taste. Door handles don't need to pop in and out, they're just handles. Every one of those motors will go bad someday.

Yes, it is common for cars with frameless windows to have that behavior of rolling down the window when opening the door. Normally it doesn't require two different mechanisms of opening the door. Also, the normal design for it doesn't trap backseat passengers in burning cars.

Looking at the picture, the release design [0] is unfamiliar to me. Maybe it is a common design for US brands? I haven’t seen such a design on any EU car that I’ve been in. Over here they look like this [1].

[0]: https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/pNrXP/s3/tesla-model-3-man... [1]: http://www.rssportscars.com/photos/cars/2015-bmw-m4-m-perfor...

I've seen similar mechanisms here in the US but usually they're much bigger. Like you can curl all your fingers around it easily, and typically not blocked off like that.

Most common is your [1] though.

US resident here. I’ve never seen a handle like [0]. Every car I’ve been in has handles like [1]. I don’t know if I’d be able to get out of [0] in the event of an emergency without being made aware of it prior.

If I'm in the back seat of a Tesla Model 3, I'd expect the handle to be somewhere on the door next to me. I'm really surprised that you would expect to have to crawl over the seats into the front to find the release.

Not on the rear doors of the Model X. I just checked, there is no internal mechanical handle.

How is a two year old strapped into a car seat supposed to manage that?

Not in the rear seats, they don't.

The Model S has one for the rear seats, but the Model 3 doesn't.

And while the model x technically has one for the rear seats, you have to literally remove the speaker grille and pull a cable behind it.

Yes they do.

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