Turn onto your back with your feet towards the door/ window, grab the steering wheel and the doorward edge of the seat, and kick out the window with both feet. This can also be done from a passenger seat as well.
Has this been tested out in a Tesla? I wouldn’t put it past them to make it literally inescapable
There is an extremely prominent manual release handle on the door in Teslas. The vehicle manual has this information displayed prominently. I don’t know how or why other Tesla owners don’t know about this.
I see conflicting information on this.
That’s basically the bottom of a locked filing cabinet. Just needs the doormat to say “beware of the leopard”
The rear door release is not meant to be used in an emergency, it would be impossible to child lock the door. The front doors have very prominent handles and the rear passengers can climb over.
it would be impossible to child lock the door
Good. I’d rather have people teach their children not to fling themselves out of a moving car, than have them burn to death because they can’t get out.
That looks to be the rear doors. The same doors that often have child safety locks and having easily accessible overrides would defeat the purpose of that as well.
On the front doors it’s in the one spot you’d imagine it would be, the opening in the door handle/armrest. It’s so obvious almost every new rider in my Model 3 tries to use that instead of the door open button, even with a custom vinyl that shows the car with an open door.
Imagine saving your child by first having to go into the car and finding the manual door release between the door and a child safety seat.
Great question! I do not now, nor do I ever expect to have any interest in owning a Tesla. However if you want to give me one, I’d be willing to give it a try.
Ah when you try to reinvent the the wheel, fail, and then kill people with it
This reminds me… I need a glass breaking hammer for safety in my non Tesla car.
They might all have one but if not, get one that has a seat belt cutter on it. And keep it in the front console, not anywhere in the back or in the glove compartment.
I knew someone (an acquaintance, we weren’t close) who died in a crash because their seatbelt got stuck and they couldn’t get out. They had one of those cutter hammer combos but it was in the back seat. Absolutely nightmarish.
My dad was driving a truck full of pigs back in the 70s. He was driving with 2 friends in a very heavy rain. They were crossing a shitty Mexican bridge when they lost traction and went off into the river upside down. The river/channel was narrow so they doors wouldn’t open. They managed to break the windshield and escape. None of the pigs survived. But neither the pigs nor my dad or friends were wearing seatbelts… because Mexico and 1970’s, reasons, etc. I mean the truck was a Datsun and those things did not have seatbelts installed from what I recall.
Also fix it to the console with a clip. Can’t use the cutter when it is out of reach because the car flipped over. And buy more than one, driver could become incapacitated after a crash while the backseat passengers are stuck.
I ride my bicycle in traffic. I find the differences in our perceived risk profiles funny.
what a metaphor for America
with a bonus nonmetaphorical Musk tie-in.
Well they don’t say where it was but I’m assuming it’s Canada since a Canada post employee saved one by smashing the window with a big pole so she could crawl out.
<smashes window> Sorry!
Regardless of where it happened, it’s still an apt metaphor for America
It happened in downtown Toronto.
Always have an emergency tool in your car to break your windows in case this shit happens to you. Even if you’re in a car not designed by a god damn moron.
Tesla uses double pane laminated glass, it doesn’t shatter like normal tempered glass. It can be really difficult to break and get through.
Also to break glass, don’t hit the middle of the glass, strike near a bottom corner where it is less likely to flex against the impact. You may be able to take a seatbelt’s end and use the corner of the metal end of the seatbelt to break it if you have nothing else. Corners for breaking
Didn’t these used to be part of the seat belt? Has that standard changed?
Well, any seatbelt still has a metal point or two, which can be used to break the window. But the person inside still needs to be conscious and not-panicking enough to realize that fact.
I actually like Musk, and when the Tesla came out, I def wanted one. But man, stories like this make me sooo happy I was way to poor ever to afford one!
It’s not unique problem to Teslas. People burn to death in their cars every single day. Most of these cases simply aren’t newsworthy enough to write articles about where as Tesla on the other hand is under constant scrutiny which skews the image of how safe or reliable they actually are.
Assuming we’re talking about a car crash in which the vehicle doesn’t catch on fire, Teslas are among the safest vehicles you can buy according to both IIHS and Euro NCAP
Fair point! I def hear it about Tesla more because of the hype.
Everyone keeps commenting mad about “mechanical doors”. Y’all. All Tesla’s have mechanical release doors. There is caveat on the rear doors:
Model S: Front and rear doors have manual release
Model 3: Front doors; rear doors only on the Model 3 Highland update
Model X: Front doors and rear Falcon Wing doors
Model Y: Front doors; some rear doors
There was one commenter smart enough to caveat the manual release should be easily accessible. I think that’s a much better argument, because you can’t think straight when you’re panicking. But for the love of God, spend 2 seconds thinking before writing your comment.
There are a lot of safety situations where you need a mechanical release, where you won’t be able to find the mechanical release if it’s a separate control. Obviously the door itself is mechanical. What people are unhappy about is that it doesn’t easily open in some types of emergencies. Case in point.
There is a manual override. This is why you should read the god damn manual from cover to cover when you buy a car. If the manual is missing, you can easily find a free PDF in seconds.
I fucking hate Teslas and Muskrat, but there is no excuse for this kind of ignorance. I feel for the families of the victims. I’m incredibly pissed off by how fucking stupid these people were.
Can I set your car on fire, and only let you out once you’ve shown me the fuse box?
No problem; the first one is under the hood on the right, and the second one is in the driver’s side footwell.
Now let me out please.
Imagine being in a burning car and needing the manual to open the doors. And then you can’t find it so you start googling “Tesla model S manual”, find a PDF, then start scrolling through it trying to find out how do you open the doors.
Here’s an idea, how about just make it so the handles mechanically open the damn doors? This is why i’ll never own an electric car, they’re full of bullshit like this where things are done electronically for absolutely no reason. I hate this fucking design phylosophy where everything has to be more complicated, less reliable and less functional.
Being electric isn’t the problem. These are design choices that assume that things will always be perfect.
That’s why you read it the same day you bought it. There’s no excuse.
Nonono. There’s no excuse to not make a door work mechanically. It should be easy and obvious to open from the inside. Why shit like this is even allowed is completely beyond me.
Ok, what about passengers?
What about kids? Should they start go right from ABC’s to the Tesla Model Y 2020-2021 Owners Manual?
What if it’s a rental, do you sit down and read the owners manual in the parking lot of the rental place before you go anywhere?
Door handles have basically been an industry standard as they are (mechanical) because of form and function. They just work, there is zero reason that door handles need to be electric and have a manual emergency release. The only reason I could grasp from the smallest straws was aesthetics: they look cooler/go better with the car.
Lamborghinis and Ferrari’s have mechanical door handles, if it’s good enough for them, it should be good enough for Musk.
Any safety feature that requires you read how to use it has already failed. During an emergency, you have to know, intuitively, how to escape. It’s why panic bars exist on doors.
Horse shit. Safety features should not require reading the manual to operate. They should be big, obvious, and easy to operate. What if you’re a passenger and the accident causes the driver to lose consciousness?
Bigger horseshit in the manual: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-AAD769C7-88A3-4695-987E-0E00025F64E0.html
Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.
How is that legal?!
Also safety features should be accessible to those panicking. It’s why heavy machinery emergency stops tend to be big red buttons/switches
Uber passenger? Better read the manual!
I want to see you recite a haiku while the car is burning. Can’t think of one? Maybe relying on knowledge instead of intuition isn’t such a great idea.
People have died in front of emergency escape doors that are slide to open instead of push because of air pressure, so expecting people to find a little loop under a plastic cover in the door compartment during an emergency is asinine. Which is the case for Tesla Y, btw.
This is what it says on their website. Hope you’ve got the link handy if you’re in a crash, and also that you’re not in one that doesn’t have this…
Realistically they should show the owners at the dealership and make sure they open it several times before taking it off the lot then reinforce it in software and make them release it once a month.
Or you know… just make it mechanical
And what about the passengers? Is the owner going to be required to give an airline attendant “emergency exits are located here” safety speech every time someone hops in the car with them? Can we actually trust them to do so?
Also, not all models have mechanical release mechanisms in the rear doors. There are models where it is 100% possible to just be locked in the back seat. And when you only have ~15 seconds to escape before the lithium flames+smoke cook you, you’re not going to be able to crawl to the front.
Well fuck Tesla. This should be illegal.
If I remember right, it damages the car to use the manual door override.
Lawl of course it does.
It used to not lower the window and could damage the window.
Shortly after the 3 was released it was changed. When there is power it lowers the window now.
But if there is no power, it can’t lower the window and it may break.
Link?
Are you kidding meeeee
Door handles are ugly though.
Worth a few lives to get them out of the way.
And don’t you know how many cents a door handle costs? Christ, we’re not made of money.
This is some “Headphone jacks are ugly” logic here.
No, this is so much worse. Enjoyment function vs aesthetic is a reasonable trade off. Emergency egress vs aesthetic is an insane trade off
Look it’s very simple if you get in a crash and are on fire.
Stop. Drop. Roll. Remove the mat from the bottom of the rear door pocket. Press the red tab to remove the access door. Pull the mechanical release cable forward. Remember that not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors. Die.
Rolls right off the tongue. If you’re still in trouble call 0118 999 88199 9119 725 3.
For english press 1. Your call will be answered in the order it was received.
For regicide, press 3
To return to the main menu, press all of the buttons on your keypad simultaneously.
Remember: To speed up, increase your speed. To decrease your speed, slow down.
It’s so easy! When you get in a crash are panicking and disoriented, who needs a simple quick lever that’s there at all times??? Simply follow these complicated 3 steps to extract yourself from the burning vehicle!
Or they could try a front door, which is much more straightforward
Man, I bet those dead kids in the back seat feel so stupid now.
They should’ve just read the owners manual (and hoped their car was equipped with an emergency release) not my fault they’re lazy.
What important living beings go in the back anyway? It’s usually just babies, pets, and children.
This is what it looks like when they’re legally forced to do something, but still don’t want to do it, and their customers are idiots who can afford to pay for redundant features.
So you know, goverment inefficiency. /s
I hear the new guy in charge of that is a genius!
Not all Model Y vehicles are equipped with a manual release for the rear doors.
I think I see a problem.
Also: that’s waaaay too many steps for an emergency. Imagine trying to dismantle the door trim when you have a concussion.
make everything electronic because Elon thinks it is super cool
put very inefficiently placed manual overrides because it was a bad idea
So happy my car is not a tesla.
This isn’t a Tesla or EV problem though. How many back doors have child safety locks?
A: the driver knows they’re locked from the inside
B: they’re always locked form the inside, they didn’t just stop working because the car lost power
C: lithium fire/smoke makes thinking more difficult than an ICE engine fire
EV complicates it
Tesla made it really bad by electric-only locks.
It’s a problem when none of the doors work. The only person that survived was because somebody not involved came and broke the window. They said they didn’t even know anybody else was in the car because the smoke was so thick. Not the best time to be searching for a hidden door handle. Admittedly the front doors manual release is way more accessible but they probably didn’t know it existed because it blends into the door panel.
Child safety locks still allow the door to be opened from the outside. Tesla’s doors won’t if there isn’t any power. You have to go dig through the interior panels for the stupid cable to pull. That assumes you are uninjured, conscious, and not panicking to even do that.
The C7 Chevy corvette has a similar issue because the doors are electronic. To put insult to injury the location of the manual release is in the owners manual…which is stored behind the radio screen that power retracts into the dash. So no power and you can’t get to the manual either. Brilliant.
Tesla rear doors don’t open on button press from the inside with no power, but I bet they do from the outside. Just like the child locks. I’ve never tried it unpowered to confirm though.
Having never owned a Tesla I searched their forum and somebody asked the relevant question. Both the interior and exterior handles are electric. So no power, no doors handles. You have to use the manual releases from inside the car.
Huh. TIL.
To add another weird kink to this. If you don’t have power and use the emergency release…it breaks the window. Under normal operation the window needs to roll down to clear but can’t without power.
In my Audis at least, the child safety is disabled together with the locks opening within a few milliseconds of the airbag control unit sending a crash signal across the CAN. That message is sent immediately when the decision to open at least one airbag has been made and therefore will reach all components while the crash hasn’t even had time to finish, so all wires and stuff is most likely still in place
Apart from that, the doors have an emergency mechanical release that is “just pull a bit harder and further on the handle”. Which is what you’d do anyway.
I can’t believe there isn’t an NHTSA regulation about manual egress from an unpowered vehicle. This is just bonkers.
When I rode as a passanger in a Tesla Model 3, the owner told me not to use the big pull handle because it was the manual release, and instead to use the button at the top of the grab bar.
I don’t know about the other models but the manual release was a more obvious way to open the door than the intended way.
Only for the front seats, and on something like the Y not all models even have manual releases in the back. The ones that do have them covered with a mat and no indication where they are.
On the model Y you need to removal a speaker grill to manually release the doors in the back.
There are manual releases but they’re hidden. They need to be more obvious because these cars are rented to people and obviously the owners aren’t taking the time to figure out where they’re at.
I would also think just having secondary power packs in each door would help in the event power is cut to ensure the doors can continue to function for a few minutes while also a speaker could explain how to use the emergency release if none of the doors are working.
All this added complexity and cost isn’t worth it to me, manual doors just make sense for so many reasons.
Eject the doors with explosives as soon as the vehicle velocity is zero and fuck everyone else. Tumbler style.
Awesome way to enter the cinema though
Or at a red carpet premier: pull up, doors blast off, step out in style over the mangled bodies of the paparazzi…
Or, how about this: it’s a door, have it work like every other car door for the last 70 years.
Redesigning stuff to make it “cool” and “futuristic” is fucking stupid and is clearly not safe. Doors have handles, the handles are pulled to open the door. Keep it simple.
The front handles aren’t hidden. They’re so obvious everyone I take in my car tries to use them first if I don’t tell them.
Back doors is a whole other story.
That’s if they have them. Apparently some models of the Y don’t come with manual back door releases.
Back doors is a whole other story.
Thats what this means. The back seats are hit and miss depending on the vehicle.
I thought that was more in reference to the release being hidden under a mat to access. The fact that ‘a whole other story’ could be misconstrued two ways I think just shows how bonkers this is 😂
Ah, I can see how that may have come across like that. My bad.
Honestly Tesla should be sued over this
The reason given for hiding them just makes that fact worse. It’s for “aesthetics”. Manual latches don’t look futuristic enough.
In the future nobody reads “the design of everyday things” apparently
In the future nobody reads
“the design of everyday things” apparently
In the US there are nine investigations involving the Tesla Model Y, ranging from “unexpected brake activation” to “sudden unintended acceleration,” according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Nice
Expect those investigations to quietly go away or turn up nothing in about two months from now.
I doubt it as that would be a very bad look
Lol
If there’s anything the incoming administration is unconcerned about, it’s the optics of any decisions they make.
Because the team that headlines with this guy giving bjs to microphones and bragging about sexual assault is worried how things look.
Those investigations will all end with “nothing to see here” in about 3 months from now
Killed by the department of efficiency
It’s an apt analogue for what we should all expect from the DOGE; burning to death while everyone watches in terror.
Holy fuck, I never registered that that was the acronym for it.
Yeah, it was the whole point.
When Trump first said that, I wondered why the hell he’s talking about Musk asking for a position title that never existed, and then he tweeted out some BS AI gen of him with the title ‘DOGE’ on a nameplate in front of him.
He basically is a 13 year old who never grew up.
Musk is edgier than some 13 year olds
but isnt the ‘of’ not supposed to be in the acronym otherwise the DMV would be DOMV
We live in hell
Not calling it that, it’s the DGE
It hurts seeing a meme that was fun a decade ago get run into the ground by being used so aggressively and so long and so fucking uncoolly.
