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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

As a kid I once got a door slammed shut on my fingers on the inside (hinge area) of the door of a now ~40 year old car.

It hurt like hell then and for a few hours after, but I guess my fingers at ~7 years old were still slim enough to come out without any permanent injury. There was some rubber padding even on a car that old (I'm thinking the purpose is making the door watertight though).

The Tesla doors look like my fingers would have had no chance. How do we go backwards from something we got right four decades ago? Especially the self-closing hatch which seems to exert a scary amount of force in an area were people will be prone to place their hands.

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>How do we go backwards from something we got right four decades ago?

Simple. By treating car developement like SV SW development, thereby not giving a damn about the past decades of automotive know-how and lessons learned, as that's considered boring and uncool crust, and only focusing on developing new unrealistic and shiny features ("hey look at this snake charger that's coming in 6 months, isn't that cool") that look good on social media to boost sales and stocks prices.

And it works for Tesla because most Tesla and newer car customers in general, don't check stuff like panel gaps, chassis cracks, door seals, panels being attached properly, etc as that's been a solved problem for decades in the auto industry that nobody thinks about anymore would be an issue today, so consumers just focus on looks and shiny new gadgets when buing a new car rather than what makes a car a car.

but apparently the snake charger or the quick battery change infrastructure or the robotaxis... never came to fruition.

So Elon just lied? /s

Even the event where they demonstrated the battery swap was so fake, I guess people weren't as aware of how brazen he was to not question it at the time. Couldn't set up a camera to show your own demo at a staged event? But it got them some taxpayer dollars so mission accomplished https://youtu.be/H5V0vL3nnHY

He did had monetary incentives to be biased. /s

Which is why I have no intention of ever buying a car from Tesla. I don't want to be the victim of the collective lessons learned we've learned over the past 100 years that Tesla blithely ignores because they believe they're the smartest people in the room.

>How do we go backwards from something we got right four decades ago?

Elon works from first principles, so it's going take a while.

A similar thing happened to me almost 45 years ago now, and my fingernail went black and fell off (it grew back, I barely 5 years old at the time). To this day, I find black nails on women disgusting.

On the contrary, I (mistakenly) slammed a door from my (now 12-year old) Alfa Romeo to the hand of a relative who was holding on the B-pillar, and it barely touched her hand at all.

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