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Tesla is looking to redesign its door handles following trapped-passenger report

cnn.com

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Re: Tesla is looking to redesign its door handles following trapped-passenger report

#81

Post by bangaladore »

fullshark wrote: post #59
bangaladore wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was highly intoxicated and driving under the influence, reversed the car into a pond and died because of it. Whether or not the doors contributed to her death is a guess at best. When a car is submerged, you aren't able to open a door generally due to the weight of the water pushing in on the car. That car has a completely standard gear stalk as well, so blaming it on that make no sense. I don't have sympathy for…

She drowned in a glass coffin surrounded by her loved ones unable to figure out how to get her out. You are able to open a normal car door when the interior is fully submerged due to the water pressure equalizing. It's very clear to me she would have survived with normal door handles and your "anyone who DWIs deserves to die and doesn't receive sympathy cause I worship Elon Musk/Tesla" position is truly contemptible.

See the issue is you don't know the facts of this case, and call anyone who disagrees with you "worshiping Elon Musk"

This car (2020 MX) had a normal mechanical door handle that works perfectly fine without electrical power. She was highly intoxicated and couldn't figure that out.

Her death was caused by herself and only herself. She was too intoxicated to understand how to open the door while it was submerging. If she attempted to open the door as it was submerged, it would have opened fine.

Please research the case before spewing ad hominin attacks.

Re: Tesla is looking to redesign its door handles following trapped-passenger report

#82

Post by vkou »

weaksauce wrote: post #78
tartuffe78 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No other car company has screwed it up this badly before. Tesla may force it to happen if enough deaths occur.

there was a rich woman that drove into a lake on her estate and drowned because she couldn't open the door in time. you'd think a high profile death of a rich person would change something at least.

She was drunk as a skunk, and drowned in a private lake on her estate, which somewhat dampens public outrage and sympathy.

... Also, exiting a sinking car - any make and model of sinking car [1] - is a non-trivial exercise.

---

[1] You might be okay if you're in a convertible with the roof up.

Re: Tesla is looking to redesign its door handles following trapped-passenger report

#83

Post by mebizzle »

triceratops wrote: post #28
Someone1234 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Plus the choices were never electrically actuated Vs. standard, plenty of vehicles before Tesla had flush fully mechanical doorhandles that reduced the drag coefficient. Tesla did it to be different, futuristic, and to show off. Then plenty of other electric vehicle manufacturers copied. Even ignoring the safety issues, these things had reliability problems since almost inception and could be frozen shut in t…

> now putting the shifter in the ceiling They what?! And people are still buying these things? This is the most valuable automaker in the world?

Because you don't need to use that shifter regularly; you shift gears on the screen in that car and they have capacitive buttons near the caution lights on the ceiling as a redundant backup.

Re: Tesla is looking to redesign its door handles following trapped-passenger report

#84

Post by triceratops »

mebizzle wrote: post #83
triceratops wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now putting the shifter in the ceiling They what?! And people are still buying these things? This is the most valuable automaker in the world?

Because you don't need to use that shifter regularly; you shift gears on the screen in that car and they have capacitive buttons near the caution lights on the ceiling as a redundant backup.

> you shift gears on the screen in that car

You're not helping bro. I'm literally crying right now what even is this car?

Re: Tesla is looking to redesign its door handles following trapped-passenger report

#85

Post by kstrauser »

dylan604 wrote: post #51
kstrauser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're driving in a competitive, sanctioned high-speed race, sure, fine. Save every bit of drag possible. At highway speeds in a normal-person shaped vehicle, they cannot possibly make a measurable difference.

Wouldn't that depend on the accuracy of the tool doing the measuring?

Not really. Stand in front of a car, squint, and observe the size of its silhouette. Now move slightly so that you can see the outline of the door handle, and consider its relative size compared to the rest of the car.

This isn't a perfect comparison. You could design car handles that look like little parachutes attached to something with the drag profile of a dolphin, but that's not a likely situation. In general, the area of the rest of the car is going to be many thousands of times that of the door handle. Given the difficulties in measuring, let alone modeling, turbulent air flow, it would be hard to detect a door handle's drag compared to the rest of the car.

I guess you could attach a meter to the door handle itself to detect how much drag it experiences from its own perspective, and that'd be pretty accurate. My hunch is it'd be an insignificant rounding error compared to the rest of the system.

Re: Tesla is looking to redesign its door handles following trapped-passenger report

#86

Post by Ancalagon »

MisterTea wrote: post #12

> The Bloomberg investigation found numerous instances of passengers who were killed or severely burned by post-crash fires when rescuers on the scene were unable to open the doors. Have any of these incidents result in major law suits? Seems pretty likely they would and should sue. Honeslt yI hate modern automotive designs. My one wish for the Chinese EV makers was that one of them just makes a friggin normal car th…

A normal car of yore with ac that gets from A to B, but is electric. Imagine that.

Re: Tesla is looking to redesign its door handles following trapped-passenger report

#87

Post by duskwuff »

ashton314 wrote: post #36
dgarrett wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the rear, it's almost impossible to access the manual release in an emergency. You have to pull out a floor mat and then pop open a panel that requires a metal tool to extract, and then reach blindly into a hole to pull the release. And this process damages the car, so you can't really practice in a non-emergency. Just so you know, this is improved the latest (2023+) Model 3. There is now an easily removable pan…

Well, they put a sign on the trash can that says “this is in fact on fire” so you know that they’re aware it’s a dumpster fire.

"Bu look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked file cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard."

Re: Tesla is looking to redesign its door handles following trapped-passenger report

#88

Post by xoa »

weaksauce wrote: post #78
tartuffe78 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No other car company has screwed it up this badly before. Tesla may force it to happen if enough deaths occur.

there was a rich woman that drove into a lake on her estate and drowned because she couldn't open the door in time. you'd think a high profile death of a rich person would change something at least.

>there was a rich woman that drove into a lake on her estate and drowned because she couldn't open the door in time.

Just to expand a bit on vkou's sibling reply, exiting a car that has already gone under water is absolutely non-trivial in any vehicle. Water pressure goes up very fast with depth: at just 10' (3m) deep, just minimum recommended depth for a simple outdoor low dive board pool, you're already at 4.25 psi. At 16.5' (5m) you're up to 7.1 psi.

Just using a tape measure on a more compact car (not my truck) our in the parking lot, a GTI mini, front door is ~1680 in^2 in surface area. So you already cannot open the door if it's air inside and water outside and you're in even 10' of water let alone more. My recollection from driver's ed and then emergency response is that you're supposed to get the window open (by lowering it in time if electric or unshorted or more likely by shattering it with the emergency tool you hopefully have in the car) and let water fill the interior to equalize the pressure, trying to get a last breath from the bubble at the top as long as possible. Then you've got a breath-full-of-air time to get the door open (or get out through the broken window) and get to the surface. And not lose your bearings if it's anything but shallow+bright sunlight, etc., easy to do under water when panicked if you're not well trained to instinctively do tricks like let out a small stream of bubbles to feel which way is up. It's a pretty frightening (and thankfully rare) scenario.

I think I vaguely remember the incident you're talking about, and bad doors certainly didn't help, but it's not the same impact as someone being trapped right on land where 99.9% of vehicles made in history would allow an easy exit.

Re: Tesla is looking to redesign its door handles following trapped-passenger report

#89

Post by fullshark »

bangaladore wrote: post #81
fullshark wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She drowned in a glass coffin surrounded by her loved ones unable to figure out how to get her out. You are able to open a normal car door when the interior is fully submerged due to the water pressure equalizing. It's very clear to me she would have survived with normal door handles and your "anyone who DWIs deserves to die and doesn't receive sympathy cause I worship Elon Musk/Tesla" position is truly contemptible.

See the issue is you don't know the facts of this case, and call anyone who disagrees with you "worshiping Elon Musk" This car (2020 MX) had a normal mechanical door handle that works perfectly fine without electrical power. She was highly intoxicated and couldn't figure that out. Her death was caused by herself and only herself. She was too intoxicated to understand how to open the door while it was submerging. If s…

Fair enough, people have died in other submerged vehicles before, this isn't unique to Tesla and I do not know enough about the exact details of how this model performs submerged, or confounding factors like the temperature of the water and her actions while panicking.

I retract my claim.

Re: Tesla is looking to redesign its door handles following trapped-passenger report

#90

Post by rightbyte »

mrguyorama wrote: post #61
rightbyte wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I couldn't believe I was actually understanding it correctly and that this could be legal I think laws are usually reactive. Why would there be a ban on such a silly thing.

Why is this desirable? Why is it a good thing that laws only happen after people already die from an avoidable and predictable problem?

I'm sorry I might have chosen my words poorly. I am also advocating more proactive safety crackdown in cases like this.

I'm just relating to the infeasable task of proactively banning permutations of silly designs.

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