I kind of enjoy baiting my friend with the manual release. He gets all “don’t use that, it doesn’t lower the window” bla bla bla. I seriously don’t care. If they think the doors are fine with a stupid electronic switch to do whatever, they can f@cking well replace whatever breaks from using the manual release until the warranty costs force them to fix their shit.
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Just use the latch. Want to explain that to a toddler?
Two in two days in Arizona.
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Did. You. Read. The. Manual…
Did the toddler read the manual?
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I bet you did not read the manual before you got in, tho…
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The manual contains everything they want you to know
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A toddler was trapped in a Tesla after its battery died without warning amid record heat waves—’safety comes last’ at Tesla, expert says
A20-month year old girl in Arizona was recently locked inside a Tesla Model Y after the car’s battery died, creating a “life threatening situation” in which firefighters had to break open the door with an ax to rescue her.
“The first thing they said was, ‘Uggh, it’s a Tesla. We can’t get in these cars,’” Sanchez said. “And I said, ‘I don’t care if you have to cut my car in half. Just get her out.’”
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I think there are quite a few victim-blaming awards to be handed out here…
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Someone is going to die. Not if, just when. And the victim blaming will be infuriating.
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I can imagine the happy megafactories, with Muskovites all singing along to Faith No More. ‘This will huuuuurt, someone. Someone eeeeeeelse!’ Faith No More – The World Is Yours Lyrics | Genius Lyrics
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The problem is in this last sentence:
No-one is forgetting that cars have handles. The manual handle in the car in question is, if not hidden, obscured and unlabeled in service of aesthetics. That makes it difficult to find – especially under pressure and especially for people more used to a traditional car. That’s in line with Tesla’s general philosophy of any mechanical element being recessed while the shiny sexy electronic tech (e.g. the normal door opener) is emphasised.
To imply that the woman in the story would be too stupid to know that this “fully automated digital car of the future” had a manual door latch and needed a bright yellow handle to know otherwise is a form of victim-blaming.
Clearly positioned and labelled (though not necessarily bright yellow) secondary door-release handles would be a good start. Especially when the electronic doors automatically lock the occupants in when the battery dies. Instead we have situations like this, and Tesla owners printing up their own labels and first responders knowing that rescues can be difficult with these cars.
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… is Elon the real victim 
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At least some of those are: do what you were trying to do, but harder, or again, which is exactly what you expect someone to do if they were trying to get out and the door wasn’t opening. The “hey, there’s another thing somewhere else to pull to open, but you don’t know where” is the deadly bit.
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I believe you’re supposed to roll the window down before you try and open the door if a submerged vehicle. That might be impossible in modern cars though.
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I haven’t been able to find a reference for it, but I thought there were some manufacturers (Subaru and Volvo, IIRC) that automatically lower the door windows slightly to prevent pressure-lock before electrical systems fail in an immersion situation.
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Oh I think that Musk is highly malicious and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did this specifically to allow what is happening here to be part of their brand… specifically that when something like this happens, Muskrats can come out of the wood work and remind the rest of us how they are superior beings who “intuitively” understand how these marvels of technology work and that those who didn’t “read the manual” deserve what they get… So, no, I don’t think we should discount malice at all… that’s part of how luxury brands work, by allowing people to signal their moral and economic superiority over others…
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Yeh I agree with all of this, including the part about ascribing meaning. What is clear is that Tesla is optimizing on people not using the handle, which introduces a danger due to natural and arguably obvious cognitive factors when the doors are not working as the maker intends during normal operation. A big part of where Tesla is accountable here is discouraging the user to use the handle.
I do disagree with this, and I’d like to highlight this is the danger here: the way the car is operated actively discourages using mechanical features in lieu of electric ones. If this is how you operate the vehicle 99.99% of the time then it can be easy to forget that manual options exist. This is in addition to (doesn’t explain away) lacking clear and obvious mechanical options. The reason why this is important (and why I highlight it, which needn’t be misconstrued as hostility towards the victim), is because it’s an important question: as automation becomes more prevalent in operation, what do we do? One option is to limit the technology, e.g., require that critical operations (e.g., exiting the vehicle) are manual only. Another is to impose design principles that meets a threshold on some cognitive measures on manual options during abnormal operation.
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