Another woman trapped in a Tesla after its battery dies

men dudes GIF by All for One Theater

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How do you open the door of a Tesla when it’s working? Is there a special Konami code you tap into the touch screen?

If all the batteries die, why does the car need to be defended against a thief driving it away?

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Did you read the manual?

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I sense a long-term running gag a-birthing…

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Did you read the gag manual? I know you’ve read the a-birthing one…

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8ui0dw

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It’s not just a problem for drivers.

The first time I got into a Uber that was a Model 3, I couldn’t figure out how to open the damn door from the outside until the driver told me. When my ride was finished, I couldn’t figure out how to open the damn door from the inside. The driver was very understanding and said it happens all the time. Why this has to happen at all seems completely silly to me. These are not unsolved problems.

At least a couple months later when I had a Model Y as an Uber I knew how to get in/out of it. It didn’t make any of these design decisions any less dumb or unnecessary.

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The fact that there is a full on debate about exactly where the latch is and how easy it is to operate should tell you that the design is awful.

Does a Neuralink recipient need to go through the manual to figure out how to keep from pissing himself?

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seth meyers GIF by Late Night with Seth Meyers

But how will we know that these are cars made for a select, elite few, who love to read manuals, if they don’t “innovate” like this!

Too Much Omg GIF by NETFLIX

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As fast as this thread has grown, it is still much shorter than a car manual, and yet I see a few posters have not bothered to look through it before leaping in with the same nonsense. RTFT.

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I think that’s in the BBS manual.

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Oh My God Omg GIF

But that’s not a manual!!!

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I have a Renault Zoe. I actually have read the manual to find out abstruse things like how you change the low speed external warning sound. Anyway, there’s a standard door latch on every door and no-one I’ve ever carried in the car needed to read the manual to understand how to operate it.

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Reasonable criticism of certain individuals and their enterprises always brings out the fanbois here. Musk, Steve Jobs, Julian Assange, Jordaddy, and Glenn Greenwald are examples. Only one of them could be considered a true tech visionary, but they do all share a common characteristic (and it’s not that they’re all white men).

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Having been in a major car accident with a broken wrist, shock, and a slight concussion, I had trouble finding the door handle in a regular car I’d owned for years. I wasn’t in a panic and the car wasn’t on fire. But concussion and shock made it difficult.

Being able to get out easily after an accident is critical. No one thinks clearly immediately after an accident and the worse the accident, the more critical it is to get out if possible. This design has already cost lives and it is going to cost more.

I need some of those thingamajigs @docosc posted. That’s a good idea even for a regular car.

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Seach on keywords “window breaker seatbelt cutter”. In the interim, I believe a spark plug can also be used to shatter a car window.

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I wonder if some one’s Telsa is malfunctioning now because the AI was busy posting about Tesla manuals on BoingBoing.

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The rubber door gasket makes an extra good seal which reduces air drag so you get slightly more miles per kWh. It doesn’t exactly break the window if you use the manual latch, but it does putt a little extra stress on it and I assume if you do it enough you break it, or you have a small chance e of breaking it each time you open it. Some other cars have a similar deal but when you use what is on the Tesla a manual emergency release the say VW tries to race you and put the window down a quarter of an inch before you can bust anything.

I expect it would be better if Tesla would try to put the window down when you use the manual release, and in the VW it might be better if the they had a button where you don’t need to worry if the motor is a little slower then the person shoving the door open.

Still works, the “hidden” latch is here:

manualopen

The second most obvious place if you are use to opening with the little button (and the backdoor latch is even more obvious then the button).

If the vehicle is merely locked with an incapacitated driver both that lever and the little button would work.

Fair, I mean it would be better if the obvious care open “thing” worked with a small force when you have better and a larger force if the battery is dead and you want to open the door despite adding some stress to the window.

That does seem better then “eh, I guess if one of our customers gets in an accident especially one where the battery is dead or the infotainment system crashes it is better to run the risk of killing them rather then a 0.07% chance of busting the window each time they open it…”

It does seem remarkably short sighted to let your product to kill your customers, especially if it isn’t all that expensive to keep them alive. Like it would be basic capitalism 101 “a dead customer isn’t a repeat customer”

In theory that is so you can leave your crap locked up in the glove box and have your car go out a robotaxi and earn money for you while you don’t need it. Which I’m going to say even if they get the self driving stuff working much better then I think anyone can in the next five years is still a giant pile of bull.

Taxi’s have horrible things done to them. Even with a drive present people seem to feel like they can spew all over the back, or otherwise get things that should only happen in the privacy of a bedroom or bathroom (or both) all over the place. Apparently Elon figures if you have a way to keep all that off your sunglasses you are good having other people get whatever all over the car.

The computer controlled glovebox isn’t even a good gimmick (you can’t close it via touch screen, and you can’t open it via voice or the app, just a button two taps away from the main screen that has moved once in the last six months).

Bingo, even the lame shit done to the car is livable, but having him associated with you because he runs the car company you bought a product from is pretty bad. Which shows how badly his personal brand has been mismanaged, which isn’t surprising given what he has done to eveyrhitng else he has touched (yeah, if I’m being fair he has done some good things to those companies at various times, but nothing about him makes me want to be fair, and hell I even gave Trump a very short “maybe he only sounds like a vile dictator, maybe when faced with the challenges of the office he will at least just sort of go along with what his professional beuarocrats tell him”, which was just amazingly nieve of me)

To be fair it isn’t about looks, or at least there is a non-looks reason. The better seal is extra range. Likely someone’s solution to “we have 325 miles of range and Elon is raging about the office yelling 330 or we are all fired…” or “we have 325 miles of range an did we can hit 330 we all get a bonus”, it may have been retained when the downsides were explored because Elon likes how it looks though).

It also seems quite robust in the face of rain, snow, hail, but not so much against a totally dead battery which seems hard to get to, but I’ll admit I’m in a cold part of the world but not the coldest, and mine lived in the garage and sits on a charger when home, so it will keep itself above freezing)

It is (see picture above), but it maybe the second most obvious place, or third. Plus since you normally use the little button that becomes the thing you get use to, and then the one time it is truly critical you do what habit has taught you, and it doesn’t work. Panic has likely set in before you try that, and if it hadn’t it sure has after, so yeah it is really bad user design to use the second most obvious place on the armrest.

Ha! Joke’s on you. It isn’t even really in the manual. Or not the prince manual the article point sout that you can’t get from the glovebox because without no power you can’t open that either.

The printed manual is around 3 pages of “how to unlock, how to charge, and how to use the touch screen to get at the real manual where everything including how any manual door latches can be located and operated”

(yeah, I know full well that makes it worse, not better)

Not so much ignorance as habit. Learn the “right” control, use it for say 300 days or so, and one day you need to get out in a hurry and the “right” one doesn’t work panic has likely set in, and now it is extra hard to remember the “wrong” control.

Yes! (not as in can I recall everything…every time I take the trailer off the car I have to work out how to tell it the trailer is gone on purpose not just fallen off…but “yes, you speak truth, it sucks to have to remember s special emergency only control because that is when you will…well you know”)

Guilty as charged! The Hyundai Ioniq 5 was high on my purchase list because it had a lot of physical controls and had a speed where I want it (behind the steering wheel) and CarPlay and such. I bought a car without that because it was around $10k cheaper for the all wheel drive version and I trusted the charging solution more. Honestly even with the $10k price difference it was a close thing.

Or an extra few percent on range.

Maybe for some people. I’ll fully admit I’ve bought a lot of cars over my live and none of them have ben perfect. I think I’m lucky when they don’t have any downsides I didn’t know about before I bought them and decided they were worth the upsides. One of my favorite cars to own the Volvo C70 convertible had a much higher upkeep then I had expected, the zircon never really quite worked right, and the dealership promised some things they never ever delivered on.

There is a printed micro manual, about 3 to 5 pages. Mostly how to open the doors, how to operate the touch screen, and where to find the “real” manual in the touch screen. Maybe where the video tutorial in the touchscreen is.

Well to be fair the manual starts out on the passenger seat not in the glovebox. Also to be fair though I’m pretty sure the manual doesn’t tell you where the emergency manual overrides are.

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Relevant:
Tesla is (quite rightfully, IMHO) getting a lot of criticism for this because every one of their cars has electronic door latches that require use of a manual release when power is out, but unfortunately they’re far from the only manufacturer that is doing this now. Consumer Reports has an article about cars with electronic door latches, and what’s especially frustrating is that it seems like they all have different types of manual releases so you have to learn a separate procedure for each make of car:

Also, some people here have suggested carrying escape tools to break the glass, but be aware that on some cars that’s a lot harder than it used to be:

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Paging @FGD135!

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