Rescuer at Fatal Tesla Cybertruck Crash Says Car Doors Wouldn't Open | Hacker News Reader

Rescuer at Fatal Tesla Cybertruck Crash Says Car Doors Wouldn't Open

newsweek.com

67 points1vuio0pswjnm750 comments

This article is from half a year ago. Why share now? Random or coincidence.

Not sure but this was covered in a Slate podcast a few days ago as well: https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next-tbd/2025/09/how-teslas-...

Parents are suing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45458344

But all you need to do to open the door mechanically is rummage around in the rear door pocket, remove the rubber mat, then pull the mechanical release cable: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T4Rs2OQLrWw

What could be simpler after getting into a crash?

And there is no reason to talk about how people burn to death in Tesla's at ~4x the per-mile rate of the average car. I mean, Tesla releases intentionally deceptive statistics on their website [1] to convince you that you have ~8x the probability of getting into a fire in a non-Tesla and just intentionally not informing customers about the part where those fires are ~32x more likely to kill you. And that 4x excess fire death rate only results in like 4x as many excess fire deaths per year as the Ford Pinto; so really what is the harm?

[1] https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

> And there is no reason to talk about how people burn to death in Tesla's at ~4x the per-mile rate of the average car.

Do you have a source for that?

Here is one of my posts on reddit with citations for 2022, the most recent year with ground truth NHTSA data as of that post:

https://old.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/1h6fzvr/tesla_bu...

For the Cybertruck in particular you can see my post about their fatal fire rates from 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43039925

Tesla Cybertruck has ~40x the vehicle-year normalized fire fatality rate of the average car and was responsible for excess annual fire deaths on the order of the excess annual fire deaths of the Ford Pinto.

Note, linked article has no details. This sublinked article has some https://www.newsweek.com/3-dead-after-tesla-cybertruck-crash...

It's completely unclear to me from this article if they failed to open because of computer control or mechanical damage. The car was on fire, I think, that's not exactly a trivial crash (though the 2nd article a fire chief says it didn't look like heavy damage to cause a fire) And they only got 1 of 4 out before the rest died? It doesn't take much to make a door hard to open or a lock fail to operate. They were also intoxicated.

What scares me, as a new volunteer fire/ems, with these is how prone to fire they are and how hard it is to stop the fire once thermal runaway has started. Especially when you are trying to pull someone out.

But as I said I have no idea from this article what happened, incredibly badly written. I'm not a fan of tesla but it almost feels like a 0 data hit piece. It's very hard to understand anything from this article.

Vastly more ICE cars catch fire every year than Teslas do. They get zero news coverage. But as you say ICE cars are also vastly easier to put out. We train on EV fires to spray them with water for hours because that's what it takes.

Easier said than done when you have to shuttle water with tenders as we often do.

Don’t ICE cars mostly catch fire under the hood or the trunk area under the car? Vs. the entire floor of the car being an explosive and very hot fire? Seems quite a bit different. I mean it sucks if a car catches on fire and burns up but if no one dies it’s significantly less of a big deal.

Tesla makes a pointed effort to withhold data at all costs, as demonstrated in a recent court case. Take care that their success in that regard does not unknowingly mislead your evaluations of safety claims against them.

Things I would never do:

• buy a car where the doors and not mechanical

• buy a car with a huge screen in the middle

• drink and drive

• do cocaine

Teslas have half mechanical door releases: If you're inside the vehicle it's easy to open the doors without power--at least the front doors. The mechanical latches in the rear doors are difficult to find.

But the mechanical latches are not accessible from the outside, and they should be. That's why I call them half mechanical.

Lots of cars have mechanical latches that automatically lock when driving over 10mph.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the safety of non-mechanical doors. But are these auto-locking mechanical doors any better?

The autolock disengage either 5 seconds after the airbags, or when current is cut. I think autolock feature is mandatory in the EU, as keeping doors close during a crash help with structural integrity.

How would an external mechanical release not result in every car equipped with it getting continually broken into? The Kia ignition fiasco was bad enough.

Seems pretty simple, the lock overrides the release, and when the vehicle detects a collision it unlocks the doors.

That’s funny considering driving any sort of a car is a higher risk activity than cocaine, statistically speaking. So perhaps you should not buy any car at all! ;-)

just think of all the cocaine you could buy with that money!

Before or after controlling for frequency of use?

Someone is selling an emergency rope pull handle for Tesla vehicles on eBay.[1] That ought to be required via a recall.

[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/306430144366

According to Bowers while speaking to local Fox affiliate KTVU, a bystander had gotten out of his car and pulled the surviving occupant out from the mangled vehicle.

From this[1] earlier article.

I've heard plenty of stories of regular cars having their doors get stuck in crashes, due to the frame bending, and firefighters having to cut the vehicle to get people out.

That said, seems[2] the electronic latches have been an issue for some time:

On October 24, just after midnight, a Tesla Model Y with five people inside crashed into a guard rail on a Toronto street, bursting into flames.

The car’s electronic door latches wouldn’t open, so rescuers couldn’t get in -- and the victims couldn’t get out.

And it’s not the first time something like this has happened. Back in 2019, a doctor in South Florida crashed his Tesla Model S into a palm tree, and the electronic doors wouldn’t open. He was trapped inside and died.

[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/3-dead-after-tesla-cybertruck-crash...

[2]: https://www.azfamily.com/2024/11/22/deadly-crash-highlights-...

> "Krysta tried to come up, sticking her head [out] from the back, I grabbed her arm to try and pull her towards me, but she retreated because of the fire."

Weird way to end the story. I mean, what happened next? She died of the fire I presume?

Stupid af to do drugs and drive, very sad for everyone involved.

I just don't understand why people accept the sheer arrogance of the design of Tesla vehicles.

I don't need to worry about the programming of the computer controlling the door handle in a Honda civic - it's mechanical and will work in basically all circumstances excluding catastrophic mechanical damage - in which case there's 3 backups on the other doors or I'm crushed anyway and it's irrelevant. Meanwhile I hear story after story of various components on Teslas failing in all sorts of ridiculous circumstances - I recall cybertrucks having issues in car washes.

It's insanity.

Insanity indeed. Along the lines of trusting crucial business functions and general life philosophy to predictive text trained on the internet since no one remembers wow memes accurately proclaiming the true purpose of the internet.

A design group that refuses to use lasers or radar for navigation does not prioritize sound engineering of any type let alone worst case design planning.

Profits must be made. How do you suppose they do that if they don't rush products to market?

This is huge revelation for me. Now to determine why I'm still making just over minimum wage and not designing any death traps

It's form over function.

That said, a lot of other newer cars already do not have the classic locking lever and handle arrangement.

Bringing up the design flaws of my Model Y in any Tesla groups and I got endless amount of toxicity or aggressive responses. Theres a lot of fanboyism unfortunately. Reminds me of Apple during the Jobs era, but more insidious.

It’s true that before Apple Silicon one could make the argument that the hardware benefits of a Mac were mostly incremental vs a PC. But today that’s not true anymore. Today Apple is both form and function. I’ve personally heard many misguided people still repeating blindly that Apple is “just” fancy design without having used Apple Silicon computer.

Apple computers (unlike their tablet or phones) are saved by extremely good Devs who managed to implement a very good package versions control, brew, and a lot of external software (non-webkit browser being the biggest) make the computer actually good.

I think Apple native package version control is worse than IIS pre-version 7, and that's saying something (maybe it's better now, but that used to be the worse).

What is Apple native package version control? Almost everyone that I know uses brew. And even people who swear by Linux use it, so obviously props to brew.

Apple computers now use more or less the same architecture as their phones, based on ARM. That is why you can install most iPad apps on macOS, and they typically work surprisingly well without any customization. Shared GPU and RAM are a game-changer for efficiency, speed, and battery life.

What is the distinction between computers and phones/tablets you're referring to?

PS FWIW I've used IIS all the way back in Windows XP days. It worked well enough for my needs at that point to run a basic web server from my home computer!

> What is Apple native package version control? Almost everyone that I know uses brew

Exactly. That mean that if you have two ruby versions, or god's forbid, two Php version (along with php server dependencies), and don't have brew, you're basically fucked. It's unusable. Shoot out to brew developers, they made mac usable.

Let's say i have spent a lot of time setting up Hadoops, installing different ETLs developped on different platforms, and application version control without brew on Mac is still one of the most excruciating thing i've ever done (not difficult, just randomly hard and time consuming. Also hellish to debug)

> What is the distinction between computers and phones/tablets you're referring to?

Can't install anything one phone and tablets. Phones i don't care, because i understand why some user want a walled garden, and you have other choices. Tablets, i don't get. You don't have any terminal access, you can't do anything on it. Maybe new version have changed, but each time my father ask me to fix something on his mac tablet, it's hours of finding the issues. On Mac i usually find/fix the issue in minutes (last time was picture ordering). You also have to run a webkit browser, so you have a way inferior adblock, which make the web less usable.

> FWIW I've used IIS all the way back in Windows XP days. It worked well enough for my needs at that point to run a basic web server from my home computer!

I'm sure it was great for personnal project, as long as you don't have to run multiple versions of software. I had to run php4 alongside php 5.1 (or 5.3, not sure) and php 5.6, with different crypt libraries and different everything, it was hell. Less hellish than running two different versions of Ruby on Mac without brew though, and ruby is more opiniated than php about how it is installed, so it is generally easier to manage dependencies, to my original point.

macOS is a UNIX (a certified one even!) so it really doesn’t care what or how you’re running a program. You can put anything anywhere manually on disk and run it. If some of those languages require any “global singletons”, that’s probably their fault even though I doubt that’s the case.

“It’s not exactly the same as Linux” is not a valid complaint for me, in case that’s the root cause of concern. Yes it’s not, and never tried to be. If “near full” isolation is the goal, Docker-style containers are always an option. Then it’s basically the same as Linux.

Also, Python is notoriously finicky with the slight differences between versions. I mostly use the JVM nowadays and that’s a breeze to run any version on the same macOS using a tool like jenv (which is available for Linux, macOS, etc). I believe Python has some of those tools also to make isolated “environments”.

PS In terms of block ads: I literally just “solved this”. I used to run the likes of AdGuard which works decently but I never felt too good about it because it’s a bit opaque about how it actually works. Here’s how you can get your own DNS-based adblock on Mac for free, in just a few minutes:

1. Install dnsmasq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnsmasq

2. Get a dnsmasq-compatible .conf blocklist from https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists

Sample dnsmasq config:

listen-address=127.0.0.1

conf-file=/path/to/chosen_blocklist.conf

#google dns or pick your own

server=8.8.8.8

server=8.8.4.4

3. In your Network settings, set the DNS to 127.0.0.1 This will pass all DNS requests through dnsmasq first

4. Enjoy system-wide (including native apps!) ad-free experience

Today I drove past a new Tesla Model Y, still with a temporary paper tag. As I was passing by I immediately noticed some pretty heavy water condensation inside one of the lateral tail braking lights. I just rolled my eyes.

Wow. If true that’s embarrassing.

"I had silicon valley interns reinvent the car from first principles, surely this wont have any consequences"

In fairness, it's good to be willing to try a different approach from first principles. It's very easy to get locked in by your preconceptions about what works, and as a result miss out on better approaches. The thing is, you also have to have the humility to admit that the new approach is not turning out to be better, and uh... Elon doesn't have that to say the least.

I agree to an extent. If the new approach shows some kind of merit, and that merit is not going to destroy one of your primary requirements, go for it. But doing it for no reason doesnt make a lot of sense.

They certainly move fast and break things.

Cybertruck owners are mentally lacking. That was obvious from the start.

Young people just don't have the necessary life knowledge and experiences to avoid unsafe choices. The mental capacity often develops after some harsh life lessons, so long as one survives them.

Surely Elon would leave a backdoor open for himself

Story from March, OP?

More recent, today:

Tesla Is Sued by Family Who Says Faulty Doors Led to Daughter's Death

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456032

Hell I sometimes can't get into an Uber when it's a Tesla.

I have a hard policy to cancel any Uber that is a Tesla.

It hit a tree at like 70-80mph - no car is going to have doors that work properly after the entire frame is deformed like that, it’s not about the handles

I was in a car wreck that hit a tree at 70mph in my mother’s Tahoe. I was able to open the door as a kid and just step out.

Gotta love the backseat drivers on HN who have no idea what they're talking about but still do it confidently.

Hardly a surprise that the Tesla engineers come from the same breed.

At 110miles car splits in half.

Source: my brother and a tree.

Maybe he was holding it wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com