this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Tesla Owners are Installing DIY Rip Cords to Avoid Being Trapped in Their Vehicles in Case of Fire (fuelarc.com)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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In case you thought cars would become safer as technology developed... rest assured, Tesla is finding newer and ever-dumber ways to make their cars dangerous to occupants (and others).

TL;DR: If you're in a Tesla and it loses power (like in a fire), the only way to open the doors is often an unlabeled wire behind either two panels or a speaker grill. Tesla owners are DIYing janky rip cords to make that wire easier to pull to escape.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Here’s the truly maddening part. This isn’t some unsolvable engineering problem. Tons of other manufacturers seemed to have figured this out, and many opt for the same simple solution. In models with electric door handles… Porsche, Audi, Lexus, even the Ford Mustang Mach-E… the solution is elegantly simple: To mechanically open the non-Tesla electronic doors: Just pull the door handle harder.

I wonder if this has to do with patents somehow. I don't get why people would even care about having a car door that requires slightly less force to unlatch to begin with though, if they can't do it safely the obviously better design would be to just have it be a regular car door...

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 days ago

The crazy thing, I think that the other guys are imitating Tesla.

Tesla was an early adopter of electronic latches. They open slightly smoother than a mechanical latch. That smoothness is haptic feedback that became associated with "fancy car" in the buyer's head. The Ford Mach-E and the Audi e-Tron... I think they're just imitating Tesla, only they don't do it in the stupid and dangerous way, because they're not amateurs. They're imitating Tesla while removing the obvious safety flaw in the design.

Of course, you are 100% right. It should just be a regular car door handle, if there is ANY risk of the door not functioning with the silly tiny-added-value electronic feature.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

I don't get why people would even care about having a car door that requires slightly less force to unlatch to begin with...

Because it's not "slightly" less. It's completely automatic. On a Toyota Sienna, for instance, a tiny flick of the sliding door handle causes the door to open all the way electronically. A 90 year old with arthritis could do it. Meanwhile, that same handle also manually opens the door but requires a fuck ton more force.