The fact that emergency responders now need specialized training on “how to open a Tesla door” is a catastrophic failure of basic design. It’s the engineering equivalent of making fire extinguishers that operate by solving a Rubik’s cube.
Tesla knows this. They have the data, they know the deaths they’re causing. They have the growing stack of complaints.
They just keep shipping deathtrap doors.
Bloomberg apparently is trying to do something about it, though.
…NHTSA is proceeding with an investigation launched days after Bloomberg News uncovered a series of incidents in which people were injured or died after they were unable to open the doors of Teslas following battery-power losses or crashes. […] NHTSA opened the defect investigation on Sept. 15, citing nine complaints submitted as far back as July 2023. In several cases, parents told the agency they were unable to reopen the doors of their Tesla to retrieve a child from the back seat, or to place a child in the back seat.
The regulator received seven more complaints in the 10 days after opening the probe.
Tesla’s approach is truly the worst engineering in history. Emergency door design goes back hundreds of years, so it’s a solved problem that Tesla has unsolved.
Firefighters arriving at a scene shouldn’t need to know the specific manual release procedure for a 2021 Model Y vs a 2024 Cybertruck. And a bystander with a fire extinguisher shouldn’t need a Tesla owner’s manual.
Of course a parent putting a child in a car seat shouldn’t become trapped outside when the battery dies. And a crash victim shouldn’t burn to death after surviving the impact because the door release is… hidden.
Tesla has grotesquely positioned itself as a “safety leader” based on all their crash test ratings and autonomy promises, while knowing their crash survivors burn to death at an alarming rate.
Tesla causes severe danger to infants, who cook in 104°F cars while parents watch helplessly. Good Samaritans can’t even help because the door design failures are so severe.
Tesla’s conduct rises to the level of “conscious disregard” for human safety.
