Originally published at: Fire Captain reads the manual and saves a woman trapped in a rental Tesla | Boing Boing
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A really first-world problem here: renting an electric car and not realizing it had ran out of juice…
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It probably doesn’t apply in this case, but firefighters need to use different procedures to for rescues from electric vehicles than ICE vehicles. So he may also have been showing extra caution, or going by the book.
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ran her rental Tesla dry
I’m rather amused by this adjective. Reminds me of pictures of floppy discs used to indicate “Save”.
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Aren’t there standards for cars concerning locked doors? Are Teslas the only cars on the planet where you need a safety briefing before you get in?
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Maybe someone syphoned her batteries.
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Must have been an impressively stupid driver, to be honest. In every EV I’ve driven there is a big number counting down with how much distance you have left.
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The customer is always wrong.
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People run out of gas on the highway all the time. The difference is that it’s extremely rare for most vehicles to have a failure mode that traps people inside if they are unfamiliar with where the emergency release is.
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Why the hell are Tesla doors electronically controlled that you cannot just simply open the door from the inside like every other car in the world?
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The mechanical emergency release is utterly non-obvious and if you use it the car will scold you.
I made the latch more obvious in the missus’ car by affixing bright yellow stickers to it. Thanks label maker!
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Lighting a fire inside a car to stay warm, also not galaxy brain level.
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No, but she’s trapped in her car and extremely cold. It’s not hermetically sealed (even though Elon has claimed they are, they do a horrible job on the seals), The door isn’t opening and has no real obvious way of opening. There’s no heat, and one of the things they tell us in Oregon is even on the interstates, you get outside a metro area and you’re pretty much at the whims of the state police or highway patrol or county sheriffs, and sometimes that takes time.
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True, but this isn’t remote at all. She’s a few miles outside of Eugene. Yeah, it was 4 am and probably 40 degrees but she’s more likely to get hit than to have no one pass by.
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Tesla deserves plenty of scorn for their non-intuitive design on the emergency release, but unfortunately they’re not the only auto manufacturer that’s been moving toward electric door releases with hidden emergency mechanical release mechanisms. There have been plenty of close calls and even some deaths because of this design trend. Sometimes the emergency release isn’t even in the door itself, but in the door frame next to it. I think government regulation is called for, requiring the release to have some kind of obvious, high visibility marking.
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There are regulations now requiring that the trunk has an internal emergency release that is easy to find, even in the dark. Frankly why isn’t there a similar regulation for the passenger compartment?
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Doors that can be opened from the inside are an optional upgrade. Pay up or die, Citizen Consumer!
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Because why would they need a regulation for that? Who’d be stupid enough to make a non mechanical release for the door anyway?
Off topic: I have a rental car right now on vacation. I have to go through a bloody touchscreen menu to tune the radio. I do not understand modern car design.
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Clearly they are moving towards a door “release” that blows the door out of its frame with clouds of smoke/steam/dry ice, in the best space opera traditions.
Oh, the customers will love that one.
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