There’s a couple things that I would like to point out here. I am a Tesla owner, not a huge fanboi or anything, but this is another press example of trying to incite fear.
One: this vehicle was travelling over 200km/hr. It hit a cement barrier. That car could have been made of bubble wrap, it wasnt going to be pretty, no matter what.
Two: there is, in fact, a mechanical override latch in Tesla doors. You pull up on the latch at the top of the panel. It looks like a door handle. In fact, most people who are first riders in my car, end up pulling it before they realize there’s a door button there. Which is a pain in the ass because the door window doesn’t automatically roll down when it closes and it can damage the seals. But yeah, there’s a mechanical latch right there for the pulling.
Also there’s other vehicles that have the exact same door systems, but the press also neglects to ever mention that. Corvettes are one that comes immediately to mind.
Again not totally a Tesla fanboi, I bought it before Elon went off the deep end. I do like the car though. Don’t hit shit at 200km/hr or drunk drive into ponds, and you are generally fine.
this vehicle was travelling over 200km/hr. It hit a cement barrier. That car could have been made of bubble wrap, it wasnt going to be pretty, no matter what.
The car looked like this after burning to a crisp. That’s a survivable wreck any day of the week (assuming seatbelts and airbags were in working order) but of course for the burning. The story says they hit a guard rail and eventually a cement pillar. Given the image, it doesn’t look like it was a head on collision and the passenger compartment is still in its original shape, so they were not likely to have been doing 200 kph by the time they hit the cement pillar. Guard rails (and I know this from experience with an unfortunate black ice incident that harmed nobody) will slow a car down quite a bit in not a whole lot of time, they’re not just there for show. My experience totalled the car, but it saved my whole family’s life by getting us down from 65 mph to 0 mph safely and in a very short period of time. It was shocking to see how short the deceleration had been once we drove past it in the daylight the following day and saw the tiny marks in the shoulder and the railing from our crash.
Crucially, one of the occupants of this Tesla crash did in fact survive, which makes it pretty clear what the survivability of the crash was. The fact is that people on the scene couldn’t get the car open from the outside and people that probably would have had a chance at otherwise being saved, burned to a crisp. You can say that the 125mph made it so they were doomed any way you look at it, but there were rescuers on the scene trying to get people out and the one person they managed to get out did in fact survive, so it’s probably disingenuous to claim that the battery fire and egress issues didn’t have anything to do with the deaths.
I’m not anti EV. My primary ride is an EV these days and I love it enough to say that everyone should drive an EV if they can manage, but claiming that the speed involved meant anyone in any vehicle would have met the same fate is probably not squaring with the reality here. The rescuer who saved the one passenger was surprised later that 4 other people had died, he claimed that it was hard to see other passengers in the car because of the thick smoke inside. I’m not saying that standard mechanical door handles would have saved the day for those 4, but it certainly seems like the lack thereof didn’t help, the battery fire component certainly made a bad situation worse, and the Model Y’s “unbreakable” laminate glass windows probably also pushed the equation more towards deadly than dangerous. I’ll admit that the press loves to bag on an EV, but there are legit dangers with battery damage and Tesla isn’t doing any favors for addressing them by making manual egress more difficult than it has to be with their design choices.
Well when you get cars designed by people who think safety regulation can be ignored, this is what you get.
