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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Some car automatically lock their doors during driving in order to prevent hijackings, especially at red lights.

Same cars has issues with drivers being locked inside if the car goes into the water. That is a bug.

Is the solution to abandon locks on cars, or is the solution to fix the problem of the car doors staying locked when submerged into water? The security system by now is fairly advanced and addressing issues with accidents is a real problem. No one however would sell cars without locks.

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> or is the solution to fix the problem of the car doors staying locked when submerged into water?

The natural progression is for hijackers to then carry buckets of water or spray cans and target the sensors that detect a water scenario.

Seems simple: we should abandon these particular car door locks, but not necessarily the concept of car door locks altogether.

If we follow this analogy further, why should we keep the concept of car doors if particular car locks can be made with bugs in them? Doesn't the possibility of bugs in locks means that there will always be a risk, even if we abandon specific locks that has demonstrated to have a bug in them?

We should keep the locks that work and don't cause other problems, and ditch the other ones. Again, seems simple.

Depends whether locks can be made to work.

Solutions exist within problem spaces, or "paradigms", a car lock is only useful for a specific set of things i.e. deterring thieves or unwanted entry e.g. at stop lights.

What I really want is a force-field to keep people and highway debris out while driving around, and a secure storage solution while not in operation.

If you could sell me a force-field car with a retracting tent, and it were safer/had less issues, I might not care to have locks on my car.

See also - door-less/open air vehicles. Car door locks have some pretty serious issues. There are some problems they just can't solve.

Locked doors can help prevent the door from flying open in an accident, too.

And maybe make rescue more difficult after a crash?

Not much more difficult. In case of a crash first responders break the window and unlock the door.

Doors are part of the structure of the vehicle and must stay closed to do their job in a collision. To my understanding this is the primary if not sole reason doors lock after a few seconds in motion.

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