Four people, aged between 26 and 32, tragically lost their lives in Toronto when their Tesla crashed into a pillar and burst into flames. Unfortunately, a malfunction prevented the car doors from opening.A woman in her twenties, the fifth passenger, narrowly escaped after a bystander broke a window to free her.
Things that involve your human safety, should always fail open. What a travesty.
Regular doors with handles don’t fail open, there is just an Intuitive and common way to manually open them, which seems like the short coming here.
It definitely needs to be marked better. The latches are definitely there, but I think the thing that sucks with them, is the owners generally understand where this stuff is, but the passengers often don’t. I’m not denying that’s not an issue, it is. Especially when everyone else is dead. It also doesn’t help that everyone often stuffs rubber mats in the backdoors that cover over the mechanical switches. I feel like this could be pretty easily solved with a sticker on the door panel, pointing to the latch, but then everyone would probably complain how it looks and some would likely would peel it off. These are the exact same folks that can’t be bothered to read a manual either.
Mechanical latches can break in accidents too though, especially ones that operate on rods, which is lost in the hysteria here. Sometimes the doors just get bent real bad too, like I suspect even if the manual override worked in this door, these young adults hit the barrier at a very high speed, that door was going to have serious damage. You were probably going to have to use Jaws of Life or break the window no matter what. I used to drive an after hours tow truck years ago for a dealer that I worked for, and in quite a number of accidents (especially the high speed ones) the doors were no longer operable. It’s just one of those things
I always tell passengers where the manual lever is, and where the break glass hammer is. What’s the point in having them if only 1 of you knows the location?
Make sure you tell them that the hammer probably won’t work great at first, as the windows are laminated, so they are a bitch to break. You have to keep at it, in the exact same spot. I don’t love the laminated windows, it’s a gift (when broke, they stick together and dont shower the passengers with glass + they have sound/noise advantages), and a curse (they are a bastard to break when you need them to break).