Tesla Owners are Installing DIY Rip Cords to Avoid Being Trapped in Their Vehicles in Case of Fire - FuelArc News
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Tesla owners have started doing something wild… installing DIY emergency escape rip cords inside their vehicles so their passengers don’t get trapped if the car catches fire. That’s not a joke. That’s just how badly the doors are designed. Here’s why: Tesla doors are entirely electronic. When you want to get out, you hit a […]

In case you thought cars would become safer as technology developed… rest assured, Tesla is finding newer and ever-dumber ways to make their cars dangerous to occupants (and others).

TL;DR: If you’re in a Tesla and it loses power (like in a fire), the only way to open the doors is often an unlabeled wire behind either two panels or a speaker grill. Tesla owners are DIYing janky rip cords to make that wire easier to pull to escape.

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    Here’s the truly maddening part. This isn’t some unsolvable engineering problem. Tons of other manufacturers seemed to have figured this out, and many opt for the same simple solution. In models with electric door handles… Porsche, Audi, Lexus, even the Ford Mustang Mach-E… the solution is elegantly simple: To mechanically open the non-Tesla electronic doors: Just pull the door handle harder.

    I wonder if this has to do with patents somehow. I don’t get why people would even care about having a car door that requires slightly less force to unlatch to begin with though, if they can’t do it safely the obviously better design would be to just have it be a regular car door…

    • Quibblekrust@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      I don’t get why people would even care about having a car door that requires slightly less force to unlatch to begin with…

      Because it’s not “slightly” less. It’s completely automatic. On a Toyota Sienna, for instance, a tiny flick of the sliding door handle causes the door to open all the way electronically. A 90 year old with arthritis could do it. Meanwhile, that same handle also manually opens the door but requires a fuck ton more force.