1mo ago

Tesla Owners are Installing DIY Rip Cords to Avoid Being Trapped in Their Vehicles in Case of Fire

fuelarc.com Tesla Owners are Installing DIY Rip Cords to Avoid Being Trapped in Their Vehicles in Case of Fire - FuelArc News

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 ...

Tesla owners are modifying their cars to be escapable if the car catches fire, because the doors stop working like normal and you need to rely on well-hidden mechanical overrides.

Which... feels pretty dangerous, like that's the worst possible time for the doors to stop working like normal.

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The manual door open on some models of Teslas require removing 2 panels that are not labeled and need a diagram to know how to remove them. Another requires removing the speaker grill and pulling an unlabeled wire.
Even once the manual door release is pulled, without power you need a firefighter's upper body strength to open the door, and it's likely that flames and poisonous smoke will be coming up any tiny gap you can create by pushing open the door a little.
Just willful disregard of your customers' lives.
- Honestly, this seems more like incompetence. They hired tech bros to make a car, not safety engineers. How these cars got through safety regulations is beyond me.
  
  Simple, the regulations don't talk about any of that shit.
  US road regulations are a blend of smart, fucking stupid, and just plain missing regulations.
  The fact any current "standard" pickup trucks are allowed on the road despite nearly half the population being short enough that they can't see over the hood is just one of the most obvious examples that the US road regulations are pointless to try and make sense of.
  
  I've been saying this a lot lately because it seems like arc words for the zeitgeist we're living through but good gods above and below it just keeps being relevant:
  Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
  When shit's this stupid, it doesn't matter whether they meant it or not...
- no they probably want you to die after the accident so that you can't tell people how the auto drive feature drove you into the building
- But how else would Tesla sell futurism to its customers? Door handles and keys are old tech, we need 21st century tech, at all cost!
- This is completely false.
  The front doors open by lifting the armrest. The rear doors have a lever just like an ordinary car (as the video in the link shows).
  
  https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/images/GUID-10B10D56-4FF2-4611-AEBA-F864E73E8C2F-online-en-US.png
  And it's not as obvious as it looks in the photo. It's a fabric/carpeted texture in a dark recessed pocket (that may have stuff in it)
  It's in no way obvious, I had to look it up to find it in my parents Tesla, even then it took me a while to work out. Absolutely terrifying if you consider that those in the back of a Tesla are unlikely to be the owners who have read the manual.
  My parents had no idea about it.
  This is recent too (about a year old?)
  
  Can you share a screen shot from the video of the back seat lever you're describing?
  I'm not seeing it. And I wrote the article, so I'm pretty sure I would have :j
  
  This is only true of the model 3 and Y, and not all model years if the 3.
  They’re describing older 3’s, x’s and s’s.
  Also all rear doors are under carpet or behind panels. Better hope the driver is conscious.

How is this legal? Who let these vehicles on the road?
- I, for one, am baffled.
  How didn't this get recalled after the first escapable entrapment death? I could find 12 fire deaths where the occupants were evidently trapped, and that was just my dumb ass Googling for an afternoon for recent cases, I'm sure there's more.
  
  Sarcasm (but also sadly likely Tesla's take): How are you so sure they wanted to get out?
  
  If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall?
  You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiple it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).
  A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall.
  If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
  If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.
  
  I remember something similar happening with the Delorean DMC-12, and they were absolutely ridiculed for it.
  
  And some of those are really horrific. I think in one of the CA crashes, one person was able to be pulled out a window before the battery cooking off got too hot for anyone to approach and help the three others who were trapped and died.
- Probably the same person who let them on the road with a screen-swipe control for shifting with NO indicator of the gear you are in.
  
  I did not realize how fucking stupid the gear selector was. I'm even angrier than when I started, and I started pretty angry.
  
  Wow that's a extremely stupid shifter control
  Stupider than the "volume knob repurposed as a shifter" from Jeep
- You don't tend to write a rule stating "passengers must be able to easily escape the vehicle in an emergency" until some tech bro makes it hard.
  
  Thing is though, this happened with the Delorean back in the day, so it's not a new problem at all.
- Regulators figured nobody would be stupid enough to mess that up and no paragraphs are needed to make things explicit. Then came Elon who thought that technically correct is the best kind of correct so he made this abomination of a manual release.
- Elon

R.I.P. Cord
- OH NO I LOLLED

At this point I don't know why anyone is buying those death-traps. For me any benefit from the self-driving feature is outweighed by the safety and poor build quality issues.
- I don't know why anyone is buying those death-traps.
  I've got good news, then! Fewer and fewer people are buying the illegal immigrant's dangerous and overpriced swastikar, with new buyers dropping and trade-ins rising every day as public support for the emerald mine nepo baby nazi dwindles daily.
  
  Instead they're buying F150s and the like that are just as dangerous to everyone else on or near the road.
- I recently got a Volkswagen with adaptive cruise control, and I'm absolutely in love with it. Never needed the car to fully drive itself, that's what public transport is for...
- Because risk is statistically low and fuel cost savings are more tangible than believing you're going to crash, let alone die. Humans are not logical. We know most conservatives don't believe in EVs and outright liberals don't want to support Musk, so who keeps buying them? Despite the reports of slumping sales, my area is continually renewing them despite being deeply blue. There's another category: the real silent majority. The apathetic majority that's being selfish and diminishing the weight of their actions.
  
  “Selfish” implies they somehow gain something by purchasing one of these death traps.
- You're not missing anything on the self driving side... Teslas only use cameras, so can never and will never actually be self-driving. Not competently, anyways.
- Take a look at comma.ai and openpilot to see whether your car is compatible. I've put about 100k miles on my comma running on my Honda Civic. Then you get a working car that's not a deathtrap and improved self driving features.

I recently went car shopping, and I had considered an EV. I told someone this, and she immediately started recommending Tesla to me, despite Elon's bullshit. She tried to tell me that Elon's insanity doesn't change that Tesla is the "best product in the space".
I have to admit, Elon's bullshit was a big factor in not even giving Tesla the time of day, but there's also issues just like this one. I do not want a car that prioritizes gee-whiz geegaws over basic safety like this.
- Having now driven basically all the EV vehicles available in my country, from the byd range to Hyundai, Nissan and Tesla, Tesla is just a straight mess of a vehicle by comparison, and don't even get me started on the Tesla indicator thing. Oh and they feel cheap on the inside, even the plaid and other high end ones. Lol
  
  Yeah, I ended up going with a Hyundai. I take delivery on it later this week, and I can't wait.
- I think she just added an extra word. Tesla does make the best electric car that is currently in space, because none of the other manufacturers have shot one up there yet.
- Tesla’s advantage was their charging network and that advantage evaporated when Musk opened the network to all other cars so he could slurp up that NEVI money (the money that Trump is ending).
  Now there are multiple better alternatives to Tesla.
- Renault are killing it with their current EVs, Kia and byd are pretty good alternatives

- That's just for a few models and just on the front two doors, the rear you have to remove a panel you also have to know exists because it's not marked in hivis. The fun one is that Tesla says you break your warranty if you actually use any of the manual releases including the y's really accessible front one.
  
  Front and back directly accessible for model 3 and y.
  Used it. Can't tell if it was used, so warranty still intact.

You need to grab the ripcord with your right hand, conveniently placed above the heart, and thrust it forward and up.

I would not expect US auto regulations to improve for at least 3.5 years, minimum.

if only there was an easier way of not getting trapped in a car...
- Yeah but that's really hard to do and has never been invented before!

Cope cord.

Huh, this reminded me of Five Nights at Freddy's and how even with murderous robots around, there is a safety precaution where the doors open incase power goes out.

These stupid cucks...

It's probably easier to get one of those ceramic window breakers and get out that way. I'm pretty sure the rip cords are actually quite hard to pull.
- They use laminate glass on the side windows as well as windshield on some models for noise reduction. Traditional window breaking tools don't work on them. It's basically a tombmobile.
  
  Wow holy shit. So if you get submerged it's just straight up a death sentence. Just when you think they can't get worse...

Do they have one for the passenger(s)? And give a little safety briefing before they head out like on airplanes?

Worship a Nazi get cooked in a oven. Justice is always served. Thank God, all men die.

I've driven a couple cars with electronic door poppers and I'm having trouble understanding why anybody would want them. The novelty of accomplishing a routine task by pressing an electronic button instead of pulling a mechanical lever should have worn off in 1985.
- Most cars have an electro-mechanical lock; with a physical connection between the interior door pull and the lock that pulls the bolt back if you’re trying to get out.
  This is an industry standard safety feature, and has been for decades.
  Tesla, in their infinite TechBro Douchiness decided they knew better than the entire car industry and took that out. Their locked are electrically activated.
  Also?
  Because of the risk of electrocution, and fires caused by snorts, Teslas turn off the power if it detects a crash.
  Fortunately, regulations require that cars sold in the US have a mechanical release somewhere accessible from the inside.
  Unfortunately for Tesla drivers, Musk doesn’t care about their customers dying in their cars and have opted to make it both non-obvious as to where it is, and frequently actually-hard to activate in an emergency.
  This is why a few people have died inside Tesla car fires- being unable to get out.
  The response by consumers is for them to add pull-thingies to make it obvious and simple. Like most models, it’s hidden under panels or carpet. Now imagine removing those panels when you’re freaking out because your car is on fire and doing something you’ve almost certainly never practiced.
  (This lack of safety conscious design is one of the biggest reasons I will never drive a Tesla.)

Another reason not to buy a Tesla

Fire? What about the ticking time bomb batteries under you?

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