Numerous Tesla owners have said they’ve been stuck inside their EVs after the cars suddenly lost power.
YouTuber Tom Exton claimed that his Tesla Model Y ordered him to pull over before it suddenly lost power and left him unable to exit.
Exton followed the instructions for the manual release to open the door, but he said this “somehow broke the driver’s window.”
I don’t normally use the word “literally”, but… Teslas are literally death traps. Their door releases are all extremely hidden and impossible to locate if you haven’t been trained to find them. It’s like they are trying to kill people.
Woah, buddy don’t think like that, let me reset that neural link for you.
Have a nice day.
My Toyota has this thing called a door handle
Heh, peasants with their ancient car doors. It doesn’t count as a car until you unlock it with your fingerprint and credit card information and bash your head four times on the roof while getting in.
The Model 3 owner’s manual states that “only the front doors are equipped with a manual door release.”
Well clearly anyone in the rear could just go out the front doors. And there’s absolutely no conceivable way that would ever not be possible, right?
Huh, this must be new? My Model 3 and S both have rear hardware manual open methods.
The Model 3 one is so easy to access that most of my passengers used it instead of the button.
There’s a little hole next to the electric door handle where you can poke a straightened paper clip… oh oops, that’s the cd player, not the door.
The new Lexus RX has this door tech as well. I couldn’t open the door in the showroom.
Walked out of Lexus right away.
So I’ll just throw out my personal anecdote, as a Model 3 owner. Every single person who’s ever gotten into my car for the first time cannot find the electronic button that opens the door, to the point that I got little vinyl decals with a door open symbol on them to indicate that button opens the door. Usually what happens for first-time passengers is one of two things:
- Someone can’t find the button to open the door and immediately grabs the mechanical manual release and opens the door just fine (as long as they’re in the passenger seat, as the rear seats do not have one. I agree that is dumb.)
- Someone finds the button and presses it, then the window rolls down slightly (about half an inch) and the door unlatches and partially opens. The person then thinks they just rolled down the window and doesn’t just push the now-opened door, so the latch re-engages after a moment. I then tell them “push the button and then open the door” and then it’s fine.
I agree that the way to open the door, even from the outside, is not intuitive when compared to what most people are accustomed to. Any time someone gets in for the first time I have to explain “press the big part with your thumb and then grab the handle”. But it takes no more than half a second to figure out if you’re the least bit observant. Hell, when I first got the car I drove my friend around for a few weeks before realizing the beeping when the passenger’s door opened was because he used the manual mechanical door release instead of the button every time. He literally found the manual release more easily than the intended button for opening the door, and just thought that was the right way to open it until I told him otherwise.
You need power to open the door? Every day I learn more and more how piss poor the design is for these cars.
No, there’s a manual release. It’s normally hidden but it’s there in case of the battery dying.
I had a car in my 20s that trapped me inside, because the door handle broke and the window wouldn’t roll down.
Apparently Tesla is making cars as crappy as my 1985 Monte Carlo I had when I was 21.
