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This tragic incident has sparked a debate about the safety features of electric vehicles and the necessity for more intuitive emergency mechanisms.Tesla is an ever-more-irritating case study in what happens when you throw out all the accumulated wisdom of an industry, dismissing them as aging dinosaurs, because you know code.
For most of the last century and change, cars have had some predictable behaviors. In the event of a total power loss (engine, electrical, etc), you can still steer the car, brake the car to a safe and controlled stop, and get out of the car. As far as I knew, these were basic certification requirements, once those things came around. You can't do a pure drive-by-wire system, because when (not if, when) things go badly wrong, you still need to be able to control the vehicle. This is why we have mechanical linkages between the steering wheel and the front wheels, hydraulic brakes that function without booster vacuum, mechanical door opening levers, etc.
In a panic situation, say, "car is on fire," people are not going to calmly consider how to remove bits of carpet and access the emergency release mechanism they don't know about. They are going to yank on the normal door opening lever, repeatedly. It should be a basic certification requirement that this works, at least for the front doors (I'm willing to grant that the rear doors can have the "interior handle disabled" child safety things, but also, once your kids are out of car seats, this shouldn't be left enabled).
Tesla's arrogance about the lessons learned by the last century of the auto industry is killing people. I'm sure they've justified it internally as "Well, once our self driving stuff is working, our cars will never crash or fail so this doesn't matter," but come on. It's been a decade and that stuff still isn't working, so maybe put some mechanical door handles on your cars.