Tesla Sued Over Claim Faulty Doors Led to Deaths in Fiery Crash

The absence of any obvious mechanical overrides makes them inherently faulty.

Yeah. Pull apart the door to find a hidden mechanism that people have never used is not something most folks are going to succeed at during an emergency

Especially in a panic.

It wasn't a problem (the door handle). No one asked for a different solution. You always engineer the worstcase scenario. In an accident someone is going to panic, be in pain, want to get out, and how they get out isn't working? They are dead if this shit catches fire and they go up fast. There's no redundancy in the lock mechanisms to account for catastrophic electrical issues. A fkn handle would have saved lives.

Sigh, stock up 10% .-.

*The Bauer children said Model S rear seat passengers like Michelle Bauer were particularly vulnerable following crashes, because they would have to lift carpeting to find a metal tab allowing their escape, which is not intuitive.* —Reuters

It's almost self-evident that the doors are faulty, but the headline says the lawsuit alleges the faulty doors are what led to deaths in a fiery crash, which is a little different, and could be a lot harder to prove. I looked up Tesla's Model S instructions to manually open a rear door: >"To open a rear door in the unlikely situation when Model S has no power, fold back the edge of the carpet below the rear seats to expose the mechanical release cable. Pull the mechanical release cable toward the center of the vehicle." Probably on page 200 of the owner's manual, stored by the front passenger seat.

Yeah, like that's an intuitive system, and we all have plenty of time to read an owner's manual in a fire.

Mind blown that this design was approved by NHTSA. Got massive downvotes every time I made this comment.

This news alone would get stock up at least 2%.

All she had to do while fire was growing was retrieve her phone, find the instruction manual and follow the simple steps of removing the floor mat, lifting the door cover, and pulling the emergency lever. So easy! It’s perfectly normal to have to give airline type instructions anytime enter a car in case of emergency.

Door handles. Not a new technology.

I'd guess that you've gotten downvoted because you are showing that you don't understand what the NHTSA does. They don't approve designs. The entire US regulatory framework is predicated on OEMs being risk-averse, and when Tesla is anything but that, the system breaks down.

I don’t know if von Holzhausen was aware that he closed off multiple avenues of defense for these suits when he admitted that Tesla were aware of the problem and were working on a redesign. This should be a slam dunk for the plaintiffs, and given the egregious nature of the problem, the damages should be substantial.

It’s not even a printed manual. It’s electronic, accessed via the touchscreen. Which doesn’t work on the event of power loss. “The best manual is no manual” - Elon Muskkk (probably)

Reddit removed the “reader” button in app browsing so I can’t actually read anything. Fuck sake. Is there a kind soul who can post the text of the article?

It's a gift link, so for the next six days or so you shouldn't need anything but pasting the link into a javascript-capable browser. Seems to work fine with firefox and chrome on mobile. There's a reason I mostly use [old.reddit.com](https://old.reddit.com)

No external door handle that works without power for first responders to access is unacceptable.

In the dark