Four dead in fire as Tesla doors fail to open after crash

One thing to note is that the car doors in Teslas are electrically controlled and a different failsafe method of opening the doors is required when the electrical system isn't working. Here's the steps for manually opening the Model Y's rear doors (car in the story the post links to): https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-AAD769C... and here's the steps for manually opening the Model S's rear doors (car in the story I linked to): https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/models/en_us/GUID-AAD769C... . Note that this involves removing the rear carpet in the Model S and the door pocket mat in the Model Y, and that the Model Y instructions note that some cars aren't even equipped with manual rear door releases. It seems like Tesla didn't account at all for what happens if passengers who aren't familiar with the car need to quickly exit in an emergency, especially if the driver's incapacitated and can't give them directions.

First, how is this remotely legal? Are there not safety standards to ensure adults can easily exit a vehicle on fire?

Second, regardless of regulations, what on earth were they thinking at Tesla? Cars catch on fire and need fast emergency exit. Do they not care that their passengers might die?

I am absolutely horrified by this. Those poor passengers.

https://www.amazon.com/Lifehammer-Brand-Safety-Hammer-Nether...

Don’t buy the cheap Chinese knockoffs.

So maybe at least storing spark plugs in each door bin.

(Btw none of the relevant police jurisdictions cared a whit about the break in. There were cameras where it occurred. I’m not sure what the societal discouragement is for car break-jns. Seems like the relevant authorities have basically granted permission to car hooliganism. They took the police report but explicitly acknowledged no one would look at it.)

Tesla is an ever-more-irritating case study in what happens when you throw out all the accumulated wisdom of an industry, dismissing them as aging dinosaurs, because you know code.

For most of the last century and change, cars have had some predictable behaviors. In the event of a total power loss (engine, electrical, etc), you can still steer the car, brake the car to a safe and controlled stop, and get out of the car. As far as I knew, these were basic certification requirements, once those things came around. You can't do a pure drive-by-wire system, because when (not if, when) things go badly wrong, you still need to be able to control the vehicle. This is why we have mechanical linkages between the steering wheel and the front wheels, hydraulic brakes that function without booster vacuum, mechanical door opening levers, etc.

In a panic situation, say, "car is on fire," people are not going to calmly consider how to remove bits of carpet and access the emergency release mechanism they don't know about. They are going to yank on the normal door opening lever, repeatedly. It should be a basic certification requirement that this works, at least for the front doors (I'm willing to grant that the rear doors can have the "interior handle disabled" child safety things, but also, once your kids are out of car seats, this shouldn't be left enabled).

Tesla's arrogance about the lessons learned by the last century of the auto industry is killing people. I'm sure they've justified it internally as "Well, once our self driving stuff is working, our cars will never crash or fail so this doesn't matter," but come on. It's been a decade and that stuff still isn't working, so maybe put some mechanical door handles on your cars.

Is that an electronic counter (likely) or mechanical? If the latter, no big deal, if the former it’s even worse than the Tesla - at least my MY has a separate mechanical over ride.

What is wrong with door handles? Tesla should have been sued into oblivion the first time somebody died in a car fire. And the NHTSA should have regulations against cars without interior handles.

Yikes. Makes me wonder if this is market-dependent. I mean, do you expect "Emergency manual door release" to be a line item in Tesla's configurator? Didn't think so.

One of the reasons I will never buy an electric car, the batteries are dormant bombs.

I hope to god SpaceX doesn't act in a careless way like Tesla has been accused of doing

I wonder whether legislators should require inclusion of one of those glass break hammers in each car?

And disappointing that the Tesla PR department is not responding to the public's questions, according to this article.

(It is correct to blame them for the way the door locks work though and therefore can be blamed for the excess injuries/deaths that result from the design decision.)

From the article:

> Four people were killed in a fire after a Tesla Model Y lost control and hit a pillar in Toronto last month.

> Five people were trapped inside a Tesla Model Y after it crashed and burst into flames The Tesla didn’t lose control, the human driver lost control of the vehicle.

From a previous article the day after:

> Police said the driver of the Tesla lost control of the vehicle while travelling at a high rate of speed and collided with a guard rail. The vehicle then struck a concrete pillar, they said, before bursting into flames.

If it wasn’t for the irresponsible driving on the part of the human driver, this incident wouldn’t have occurred in the first place. The driver paid for this with their and others’ lives.