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.
They've had huge pushes to add EVs to their network, which is great but this means it’s an increasingly likely for someone to get stuck. I’d include these instructions in their in-app safety center if I were them…
> Tesla has the highest fatality rate, so that is ruled out! :)
Do you have a source? Genuinely interested. From the little reading I've done Tesla seem to have put quite a bit of thought in to making their cars perform well in crash tests so it seems surprising that they'd have a high fatality rate.
> The study's authors make clear that the results do not indicate Tesla vehicles are inherently unsafe or have design flaws. In fact, Tesla vehicles are loaded with safety technology; the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) named the 2024 Model Y as a Top Safety Pick+ award winner, for example. Many of the other cars that ranked highly on the list have also been given high ratings for safety by the likes of IIHS and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, as well.
> So, why are Teslas — and many other ostensibly safe cars on the list — involved in so many fatal crashes? “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities,” iSeeCars executive analyst Karl Brauer said in the report. “A focused, alert driver, traveling at a legal or prudent speed, without being under the influence of drugs or alcohol, is the most likely to arrive safely regardless of the vehicle they’re driving.”
Sure, makes sense, but then we have the invisible, possibly non existent emergency door release. Do they also go through the effort of pointing this out as a factor in the statistics? Or is that not counted as a design flaw? Whether they’re saying the truth or not, i think in these roles, it’s very easy to omit damaging information while not outright lying. It’s also easy to be taken to lunch by a Tesla person to talk about how to cushion the reports impact.
A good instinct, but the point is it's important to think about what the data means. The authors of the paper are just saying that the populations of people driving each type of car are different so looking at a percentage of fatalities is not particularly informative. If you took all those people who currently drive 20 year old fords at 10 under the speed limit and put them in teslas, maybe the tesla fatality rate per billion miles would start to look a bit better.
So it's because irresponsible tech bros & the like are driving high performance electric cars at speeds and accelerations that they're not used to after the Toyota that they owned previously?
I feel like this gonna become a real problem as (any brand of) electric cars fill out the world's fleet.
The analysis you refer to isn’t super interesting as it’s not controlled.
You’d need to be able to prove that independent safety and crash testing organisations are pushing out faulty results, since Teslas are among the safest (if not the safest) cars by their standards.
That statistic is not controlling for the drivers. It's interesting, but it may be biased by who buys Tesla and how they drive. Similar to likely "cars with aggressive custom paint jobs have higher fatality rate".
Maybe. Taxi drivers have different incentives/experience/routes than the other population. It may apply to them, or not. For ride share, the choice of Tesla may have been mainly economical for them.
I would still favour the car that has good crash test safety scores and AI powered safety features that work relatively well according to independent tests, over the random taxi.
But otherwise I agree, the door opening mechanism should be improved.
Especially egregious considering it's likely kids will be back there. And the release is in a place thats probably impossible to get to from the front seat (in the model Y)
I had to kick the rear door of the family car after an accident when I was about 11. The car blocking both doors on the other side was on fire, and I was later told our car was also on fire.
I wouldn't have known to lift the carpet and pull some release tag, and with the door badly damaged from a collision I also wouldn't have been able to kick it while pulling the tab. It was night, so finding and using a glass-smashing tool also seems unlikely.
You probably can't break the glass either. Newer vehicles, especially Teslas, often have laminated glass that glass breakers have been found to not break.
Someone on Mastodon pointed out that not all Model Ys even have the manual release. I didn't believe this could be true - how could regulators allow this?
"Tesla didn't account at all for what happens ..."
Tesla might not have, but you can. Always have a glass breaker and seatbelt cutter in your vehicle. Doors get crumpled and can't open regardless of make/model.
With tempered glass, firefighters heading for a vehicle accident attach glass breakers on a string to their gloves. That way, they can pull a person out of a car in 20 seconds if the immediate danger is larger than the medical considerations, and the person isn't stuck.
With laminated windows, you need a Halligan bar or some other poking tool (sometimes forcefully moving a spike towards a patient) to make a hole, a Sawzall which needs 10 seconds alone to go through common glass, time to get all of that...
It's worrying how much faster vehicle safety is moving compared to emergency extraction capabilities.
Usually rear windows do not. Even laminated side windows can be defeated more easily if cracked. The lamination is pretty thin compared to many other types of laminated glass.
That advice will work for significantly limited number of population. Like, it's true, but also "hope you have enough mass/strength/flexibility". My little-old-lady neighbour could not do it.
What is an "unlikely event" for any given passenger is nearly a 100% certainty for Tesla. The engineers and product managers who came up with that solution probably have trouble sleeping at night these days.
I bet they wanted something more obvious but were overridden by someone who wanted to keep the vehicle sleek and futuristic. If so, it's the worst kind of "I told you so" :/
I'm always surprised to see this comment without seeing a response that this is required by law in the United States. Remember child locks? They are on all cars. The manual release cannot override the child lock so it has to be hidden to meet federal law.
Lexus’s latest cars have electrically controlled doors as well. The mechanical failover is a bit better mind you, you have to pull twice instead of pushing, but I am not sure how panic proof it is.
I live techlnology but IMHO it is overdone in modern cars. Please bring back tactile and mechanical controls where possible.
I’d be curious if there’s a single brand that has no electronic door latches at this point. Every brand I can think of has them on at least one vehicle. They have been in mainstream brands (like Chevy) for like 20+ years now.
Regulations are written in blood.. it’s really disappointing to see a car make it to production without an obvious mechanical way to open the door. I’ve been in many teslas and hadn’t given this much thought, figuring there’d surely be a way to open the door if I need to get out.
The cables are cheap, designing a door latch system to be easy to install/cheap to manufacture is not. Why do you think all parking brakes on all ICE vehicles have turned electric now?
Every car with frameless windows does this without the need for a death-trap electric door release, i work in McLarens and the windows will drop if the battery gets low so you can open the vertical doors with a dead battery.
Frameless windows are aesthetically pleasing to many people. Tesla aren’t alone in that preference, they are just one of the few brands that use frameless by default even on the lowest end vehicles they sell, so there’s a higher number out there.
There were plenty of older frameless doors where the door itself opens mechanically and the window lowers slightly. A lot of the older subarus for example.
What's special about Tesla (or any of the other newer cars with full electrical door opening mechanisms) that makes this not an option?
A lot of cars have electronically controlled doors.
It’s due to the frameless windows. Opening the door requires the windows to roll down slightly to avoid damage to the outer trim.
The doors still have a mechanical release so there’s no cost savings involved. For the front door they’re right next to the electronic release. For the rear doors they’re hidden under the passenger door pocket.
Edit: to everyone replying I never said it was a necessity. I explained why they did it. I’m aware of alternate approaches.
Not necessarily. Many cars have manual doors and frameless windows. A 1996 Subaru comes to mind. Tesla could easily make the windows dip when a mechanical handle was activated.
Electronic door latches are fine, it’s the backup mechanism that is the problem. Some cars have the mechanical alternate forward of the electrical release such that if you are grabbing frantically you would eventually pull it. This still looks minimal if that is more important than safety.
To make the marks they're selling the death sedans to feel like they have something special until the vape batteries under the car spontaneously combust and roast them like a gas station hotdog
I always thought it was a luxury item like soft close doors on high end luxury cars. Supposed to feel premium compared to actually pulling a mechanical handle.
Damn if only we had the tech to open doors mechanically. Imagine that world. I hope Elon takes a few weeks away from destroying the US Government in January to think about this./s
For real though, I hope the relatives of the deceased take Elon personally and Tesla as a company for all they're worth.
> Note that this involves removing the rear carpet in the Model S and the door pocket mat in the Model Y
Seriously? How many people would be capable of pulling this stunt off in a burning vehicle filled with smoke? Especially considering the fact that in this case the vehicle was packed (5 people in it)--it's hard enough to get your own feet out of the way.
If this passes the safety regulations, those regulations should be changed. Not just expecting car manufacturers to do it out of their good will because they won't.
Regulations are written in blood. This is likely the first time a mass produced car went this far in not caring about the humans inside. I would say that they will be new regulations soon, but given the political climate in the US, I'm unsure if it will actually happen.
We can only hope that Canada and other countries takes the lead and forces the improvements to passenger safety.
> Tesla has faced criticism in the past for the design of its manual release levers, which are considered poorly designed and unintuitively placed. These emergency measures require intimate knowledge of the car, something that may not be feasible in a panic situation.
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.
This seems like a huge failure on the part of the NTSB. Tesla is getting a lot of attention for this incident, but are there other manufactures that would have had the exact same problem given this same incident?
The entire point of organizations like the NTSB is to prevent unsafe cars from going into production.
The NTSB has given this type of door opening a green light. WHY?
> This seems like a huge failure on the part of the NTSB.
This is a deep misunderstanding. NTSB is not an organization with a regulatory power - it is an "investigative" agency. It does not have any mandate or power to stop anyone from doing anything. It can investigate and issue recommendations and reports to other agencies that have the actual power - FAA, FHA, NHTSA, etc, etc.
Unfortunately the NTSB doesn't actually have that power...
It's an investigative agency, intended to investigate accidents and make recommendations. Unfortunately, they're just that: recommendations, not mandates. It's up to the agencies that govern the respective industries to issue regulations enforcing those recommendations (i.e., the NHTSA or FAA).
In reading a bit on this topic: According to the NTSB, vehicle models with automatic locking doors should automatically unlock after an accident.
This begs the question did the door automatically unlock? Perhaps the vehicle was so damaged that the door could not be opened due to structural damaged to the door itself.
The tolerance on many doors is such that even with a slight amount of damage, they are "physically" unable to open. The latch mechanism can get "jammed". Per the NTSB, they recommend that all electronic locks disengage in the case of an accident. Does Tesla follow this recommendation?
It's possible the vehicle was damaged in such a way that none of the door could open because of mechanical interferences.
As someone else has pointed out, a car with electronic opening won't open even an unlocked door without power, so the Tesla could be compliant without meeting the spirit of the recommendation.
Actions speak. Also, think of the many hours, spent by many people, designing, testing, writing the manual, manufacturing, etc. Lots of people need to sleep at night.
On the other hand, many in our society devalue human life in the name of progress, anti-liberal politics, etc. If society shrugs at Covid deaths, war deaths, oppression, climate change death and costs - why worry about this?
US safety standards require that a child cannot manually open a rear door if child locks are engaged. An emergency manual release can't appear and disappear depending on whether the electronic button is enabled. Children die this way in all cars.
And now he's bought his way into US aristocracy so he can do whatevr he wants and no one can stop him. He doesn't like criticism from the NTHSB? Well he can deem the NTHSB "inefficient" and have it downsized and the leaders sacked. Does the FTC think he's lying about his self-driving claims? Well maybe the FTC is inefficient and he just makes a call to Trump and the DoJ won't be investigating anything either. The US is now completely an oligarchy and kleptocracy.
Don't worry, I'm confident that with Enron Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency, if this is illegal now it won't be for much longer. People like Musk are just natural born problem solvers.
I’ll leave a thought that isn’t a Tesla criticism (because the others are good): everybody should carry a lifehammer in their car. If not for saving your own life, it might come in handy for saving somebody else’s.
I don't buy safety/medical products from Amazon. There was a time (maybe even today still) where those products go into a big bin with no verification of who the actual supplier was (1st vs 3rd party). I don't know how to verify if the issue has been resolved today, but life-critical items such as tourniquets, meds, etc. are expected to be 100% made by the supplier. Unfortunately, the money in the industry is so big that "cheap Chinese knockoffs" are being sold as high-quality replicas, even though they may not meet all the required specs.
There were many cases a few years ago of people buying branded tourniquets, only to be sold fake ones. The item looked genuine, but the integrity of the plastic could not maintain the pressures needed and broke. An emergency is not the time to realize that mistake.
I'd add that for anything your life depends on, my general rule is don't buy from Amazon. Buy from the manufacturer. Way too many counterfeits on Amazon.
Lifehammers don't work on laminated glass, like your front windshield (that would be bad, as it would mean a rock chip would shatter your window).
But more and more manufactures are putting in laminated side windows in their cars both for comfort (noise) and rollover protection, so Lifehammers don't work there either.
This isn't a solution though; the driver of an uber may have a lifehammer somewhere, but the passengers don't know about it. It is simply criminal not to have an obvious way to open the door.
Maybe cars should be designed with a small button and a system to do that when airbag is deployed.
If you carry a fireweapon, don't lose time finding the lifehammer (But then we need to choose between bulletproof glasses for external threats or breakable glasses for internal danger. Both options are exclusive).
This is way too big for everyday carry, just in case my Lyft happens to be a model S. They should forbid those as cabs or take them off the road entirely.
I recently had a break-in to my Tesla. All captured on sentry mode. The thief got in with a subtle, barely visible stab of their wrist. The Tesla service person who replaced my window figured it was a spark plug. In the video they barely make contact with my window and the whole window shatters, completely.
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.)
It is the spark plug insulator. They are using the ceramic from it to break the glass.
I remember hearing about this in the 90s with thieves carrying insulators on strings in their pockets.
The model Y's inability to roll down its rear windows is another safety liability. I had to vomit out of an Uber and had much difficulty getting my head out the tiny opening.
This is an issue with many modern cars, not just Tesla. The rear windows physically can’t roll all the way down due to the shape of the doors.
One way to solve it might be to design a window mechanism where the glass rotates in the frame rather than just sliding on a single axis. But as always, there’s a cost and complexity trade off.
> This tragic incident has sparked a debate about the safety features of electric vehicles and the necessity for more intuitive emergency mechanisms.
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.
My Chevrolet truck while having an actual door latch, doesn’t open the doors if they’re locked. You have to pull twice.
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.
How about a simple tiny safety hammer instead. The ones a lot of cars (at least here in the EU) are already outfitted with. As others have pointed out, any car should have such a hammer.
I am so glad I didn’t buy a TSLA during the 2020-2021 hype. These vehicles are god awful, and are now glorified status icons. Safety is clearly a third or fourth priority.
I don't understand Teslas. I take a ride as a passenger in my friend's Tesla about once a year. And every time, the ride ends with me going, "how the fuck do I open this door?"
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.
This is why it's so dumb to want "more" or "less" regulation; clearly, there is some regulation we want, and some we might not. We should always be arguing specifics, not generalities.
> Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.
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.
Was watching a video on the new Lexus RX 350s and they are moving to electronic door mechanisms too. Talk about solving a problem that doesn't exist - oh how I loathe modern vehicles.
You know, I was really sad when the Shuttle retired in 2011 (which itself had numerous safety problems they probably had to fix). And this glowing idea SpaceX will aid us onwards into the future, blah blah.
I hope to god SpaceX doesn't act in a careless way like Tesla has been accused of doing
Enron Musk has also mouthed off about NLRB and OSHA stuff before too, which seems like a red flag for a company employing workers to handle hazardous materials and do dangerous things.
I have two in the compartment between the front seats, and I also have an axe secured under the seat. However, accidents are random events; you never know what will happen. If these tools are still in place, can you reach them, and are you able to use them, among other things? So I wouldn’t count on it in the slightest.
It is said that the glass breaker no longer helps with laminated side windows. What then. Kicking the window out, if that's even possible, could be the only way.
Unfortunately kicking doesn’t work, it needs to be strong enough with momentum which you can’t do from the inside with current position, not to mention any injuries from the impact.
If they're going to legislate anything it should be that door handles (internal and external) just can't be like that in the first place. I say external and internal because a few articles went around HN a little while ago of parents ending up with their kids locked in teslas on hot days and unable to get out because the stupid thing had no mechanical external door handles.
It really troubles me that in many countries we have to ponder legislating something as fundamental as car door handles. Like, yes, regulations are written in blood, but door handles? Do we really need to be told to make door handles mechanical and where door handles go? It's just absurd to me that these doors were designed as such in the first place.
The irony is that rear doors don't have emergency overrides easily accessible because of federal regulations. If we did, children would use them when the child lock is enabled.
Just calling out the poor way this (and many) articles write about car accidents. I’m not a Tesla fan at all but blaming Tesla for the crash is incorrect.
(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.
>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.
This is what is being discussed here: that four people burned to death because they were unable to exit the vehicle.
It's not entirely fair to say it happened in a vacuum, either, since car doors are damaged and fail-shut enough that almost every fire department has hydraulic rescue tools to force open trapped cars.
The spontaneous combustion of Tesla's battery pack was the proximal cause of death here, but that's an EV problem in general, and will probably only grow as they take over the car market.
Maybe we need the car version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBSAFE to account for EV combustion risks that prevent FDs from responding in time for locked doors.
It's not correct to blame them for the way the door locks work. This is the case on all electronic door handles, now becoming common on new cars. The reason you can't have an emergency manual override easily accessible is that a child could use it when child lock is enabled. The US government created this problem.
That is incorrect. This is not the only legal way to design this.
I own a Volkswagen ID.4, also an EV with electronic door handles. The door handles also function as the mechanical emergency release. When the handle is only slightly pulled, the electronic release opens the door. When the handle is fully pulled twice, the mechanical release opens the door. The car also has (electronic) child safety locks, and is legally sold in the US.
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.