Or so say a lot of people. (It is why I won't ride in a Tesla.) Safety warnings over Tesla-style car door handles linked to deaths
Safety experts have raised concerns over the reliability of Tesla-style car door handles after they were blamed for the deaths of passengers.
Car safety officials at the United Nations have sounded the alarm following incidents of people burning to death after they were trapped in vehicles after a crash.
If you own a Tesla, make damn sure everyone in your family knows how to open the doors in an emergency. I would buy several glass-break tools and keep them in the car, if I was ever to own one, which I won't. (Not the hammer-style, the spring-loaded style.)
While there is usually (technically) some way to open the doors from the inside, that doesn't help if the people inside the car are unconscious after a crash. And even if you're not unconscious, on some models, the control can still be difficult to find.
“Instructions in owners’ manuals ... are no practical solution at an early stage of rescue,” the experts added
This is not just a theoretical issue. Tesla Model Y door handles now under federal safety scrutiny
As Hull detailed, Tesla’s door handles rely on the car’s 12 V battery to work. Should this fail, there is no way to open the doors from the outside, something that has cost lives as first responders have been unable to free occupants from burning Teslas.
As I've said many times. No one does proper systems design anymore. Or why would you design a car whose doors can't be opened if people inside are unconscious? Did Tesla think their cars would never be in crashes? Or did they just think it was cool? (Hat tip to MGUY Australia)
This may be tangential, but the Software industry seems in love with the idea of "change for the sake of change." With the exception of security fixes for stuff they didn't catch in the previous release, updates are almost invariably meaningless little features. Someone likes the idea or even the name and it becomes the product.
ReplyDeleteThis is where the idea for battery powered door locks comes from - which are **by definition** going to fail without the battery (unless designed to unlock without voltage). At best, someone did some searches on "car fatalities from door lock failures" or some other stupid, tangential term like that. They found few or no fatalities like that because nobody else was stupid enough to think do it.
A running joke between wife and I is that a feature got added because someone could put it in their annual review as an achievement for the year.
This didn't start with Steve Jobs, but it exploded with the iPhone. And in some ways he was right. No one was clamoring for the iPhone, though people had flip phones and MP3 players, and personal assistants were still a thing, I think. So he created something that no one wanted, and everyone wanted.
DeleteThe example before that was probably Sony's Walkman. Take your own music with you on a run? Just use a transistor radio.
And that kind of attitude works with truly innovative products. It doesn't work with mature products. You just create noise
The problem with Tesla is that no one (apparently) was an automobile engineer, or even a failure analyst. Tesla cars would fail if you drove them through a car wash, at least early on. The Tesla trucks that were destroyed by towing trailers inside their listed towing capacity. Who designed this stuff.
DeleteLocking people in the car after a crash seems like an insane choice. You would think the lawyers would force a change, if nothing else