this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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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.
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...
Point taken.
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.
Now, guess which of those two vehicles is regularly used for anything that actually requires a truck bed vs which of those is used to pick up kids from school.
This all sounds mostly right to me. But the regulations aren't pointless, they're just incomplete. I'm still quite happy that we have these protections.
And also, you tend to only get regulations on issues after they've proven to be a problem. It's like warning labels, if you see a label that says "don't put your hand here" it may be because someone did once, and it was bad.
So with that in mind, there hasn't previously been any need for regulations on door handles that don't work without power, because it's never been an issue before. Now that we see a need for that kind of regulation, we may see it go onto the books. Now it's true that we shouldn't have to spell that kind of thing out in legislation, but (and I can't stress this enough) people can be very dumb...
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?)
If the car doesn’t have the power or is too damaged to open the door normally and you need to use the manual release then it probably won’t retract the window that tiny bit either. Which means using the manual release will break the window. You can Google around for it but here’s an example from a Tesla forum.
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.