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Comment by bloopernova | Hacker News Reader

Certainly people have died because their electric windows wouldn't work when the car was submerged in water. If I were world dictator, I'd mandate manual override levers for electric windows.

Everyone should own a car window breaking tool, like a resqme. https://resqme.com/

Tesla arrogance was shown with their semi truck design with the drivers seat in the middle of the cab.

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People have died because their Tesla had electric doors and they couldn't open them after an accident [1]

[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/four-die-trapped-burning-tesla

holy crap, their doors won't open without power?!?

How does that ever get past safety standards?

Because the legislation doesn’t require that. And they want even less legislation. I mean, how does one even come up with a car made out of stainless steel with edges sharp like knives.

Legislation couldn't have foreseen a future where such basic features were depending on having power. Yet here we are.

The European legislation works just fine. The problem is not lack of said legislation.

Rules made long before anyone would come up with electric-only doors outside a sci-fi fantasy. (OT how many "try to push open that deactivated door" does Star Trek have power episode, on average?)

because there's a second manual lever that does work without power

This is happening on other cars with electronic door handles too... not just Tesla.

Those tools often don't work because the glass in many cars consists of layers of glass and a polymer. That gives it some nice properties but it's unbreakable even with a sledgehammer. I don't know about Teslas but I wouldn't be surprised if they again threw safety out of the window here literally.

You want point of pressure tools to break the window, not a sledge hammer. My wife made me buy them for our car.

Those often do not work as expected on laminated glass that is now becoming more common on side windows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peETCNekXSs

Tip of you find yourself having to break a car window and you don't have this kind of tool: supposedly, you can remove your headrest and hit the window in a corner with the metal rods to break it. I don't have the luxury of being able to try, nor have I ever had the necessity to try, so take this with a grain of salt. But if there's any truth in there, better to know about it than feeling helpless.

I have always assumed that I could just kick the window to break it open in a situation like this.

Car windows are probably harder to break than you think...lol. Also - consider the situation where the car is in, or partially in water, and pressure differentials.

(There was actually another HN thread about this recently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39691780).

I keep a Resqme in the car glovebox - my other half used to do a lot of interstate driving, and I was always worried she'd be trapped in the car. The Resqme has both a seat-belt cutter, and also a centre-punch for easily breaking the side windows.

Side windows in most new cars are also laminated. The quarter windows are the one you should try break.

This is a genuine question: how useful is the resqme in a glove box? Do you think the driver could reach it in the event of an accident, or do you keep it so the passenger can use it to free the other occupants?

I'd clip it to the seat belt pulley. But round here you'd have difficulty reaching speeds to have a crash, what with all the minis doing 20 under the limit

windows are normaly tempered glass. You can't kick them out.

They're also unbelievably strong when they're completely rolled up and incredibly weak when they're not.

Although a tiny piece of ceramic at just the right speed will shatter any window.

And I recommend a spring-loaded window breaker, as opposed to having to, like, physically hit the thing against the window.

When I was a kid I worked in a double glazing factory. Some of the old timers demonstrated just how hard it is to break a piece of toughened glass to me by whacking one with a bit of wood right in the middle of the pane, really really hard. Nothing happened. Then the dude tapped it really quite gently with a glass breaker in the corner (where it can't flex as much he said) and the whole thing exploded into those little cubes you see on the ground in dodgy car parks.

There is a mythbusters episode about exactly this that is definitely worth the watch.

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