433
Father and son incinerated after ‘self-driving’ Tesla suddenly slammed into tree
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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Terrible engineering. And it cost these two their lives, as well as others.
But those flush handles are so pretty....
From the user manual: it is so easy, in case of a fire, just calmly remove all your stuff from the door pocket, then use nails to remove the rubbery mat on the bottom of that, then take out a plastic cover, there's a cable, pull that cable. So easy and totally intuitive when someone is panicking after an accident! /s
Ps: I wonder what the user manual means with that "if equipped" part. Some models don't actually have the emergency unlock under the mat?
Sounds like your typical safe lawyer talk, this way when you're about to burn to death and the cable ain't there because they forgot it/cheaped out/decided to stop including them to save costs, you can't complain!
Earlier models had no emergency latch for the back seat, and only the front seats have (and always have) super obvious manual handles.
IMO if a door has an electronic lock and normally opens with a button (which is dumb), the backup system has to be something you can use if you're on fire and have a concussion after a crash.
Apparently Audis have an electric lock but still use a regular latch instead of a button. In an emergency you can open the door by just pulling harder on that door release latch. In a Fisker you can do it by pulling on the handle twice. In a Ford Mustang if you yank hard on the door handle it acts as a release. These are all things I can see someone doing in an emergency without thinking.
I guffawed at the "in the unlikely situation your model Y doesn't have power". Like in a car wreck when you need to escape?! The most likely cause for total battery failure just happens to overlap with the most likely time you will be on fire, trying to find your way out of this thing.
We wouldn't want safety to ruin the AESTHETIC, would we?
O! Thank you for this picture.
I was in somebody's Y (I think? I don't know teslas) a few weeks ago in the front seat and I pulled the mechanical door release across multiple different stops around town before he told me I was supposed to push the electronic "open door" button.
That spurred me to think "wait, if I pulled the mech release by default and it's pretty obvious/intuitive, what's all the hubbub about getting trapped in a car because the manual door releases are so difficult?"
I didn't realize it was about the rear door handles rather than the front until right now. Granted, the front manual door handle is fairly different than "most" cars but I still found it pretty obvious... more obvious than the need to push a stupid little button to open a door.
People that havent been in one actually still make a fuss about the front ones because they don't know its there. People who own one do though, as you've demonstrated how easy it is.
The real fuss should be about the back ones though, and how if youre unconscious people on the outside have no mechanical way.
I suspect the driver after this high speed crash was either unconscious, or the door was jammed, otherwise i think he would have gotten himself out.
Holy shit I didn't realise it was there. I always assumed it would be under the floor mat where your feet usually are. This is so much worse. Those pockets are always full of crap and I bet removing the bottom bit is easier said than done. Especially when you're on fire.
These two were dead as soon as they hit the tree.
While I understand the outrage, this is misleading…..
What’s important for this crash are the front door emergency releases and lack of an outside emergency release. The front door releases are probably fine, depending on model year, but if the crash is bad enough to damage the battery pack, they weren’t getting out under their own power. We also don’t know whether the outside help would have been in time but we do know the electronic latch failed by that point so there was no way to open the door from the outside