The best part is this man then proceeded to blame Tesla for his own negligence
Well, it happened again. Jut when one thinks that we humans as a species have gone and done the absolute stupidest possible thing we can do, someone, somewhere says “hold my beer,” (or coca-cola if you don’t drink) and proves to us that no matter how stupid people are, we can always be stupider. Here is one such story.
A man in Arizona (Congratulations Florida man for actually staying out of the headlines for once) says that he was “trapped” in his Tesla after realizing that his battery was dead. What he didn’t know is that the manual release for the door was under his left hand the whole time and now he is blaming Tesla to “raise awareness.”
Moreover, the “genius” in question, Rick Meggison, 73, says that Tesla needs to address what he calls a “safety concern” involving how to exit the car when the battery dies. The door latch on all Tesla models is electronic so the brand includes a manual release in case the battery dies. Meggison clearly didn’t know of this.
“I couldn’t open the doors. I couldn’t lower the windows. The computer was dead, so I couldn’t open the glove box. I couldn’t open anything,” he told ABC7. Of course, he could have simply opened the door in about two seconds had he known that the manual release was just ahead of his window switches, like in all Tesla models.
“It simply said replace your battery,” he explained further. “It needs to say that earlier. It died first. I hope by letting people know about this, maybe, we will make people a little safer.” What do you think here? Could he have spared himself the trouble by actually reading the Tesla owner’s manual for five minutes?
Tesla also outlines this procedure in its owner’s manual but Meggison clearly did not read it, but then again, who does anymore? It’s clear from complaints to the NHTSA that quite a few Tesla owners face similar issues without knowing about the simple solutions available to them so clearly, Meggison is not the only genius out there.
On top of that, in one case, an owner says that their dogs were trapped inside the car when the battery died. In a case like that Tesla offers owners a way to manually open the frunk and power the battery back up to open the doors and this information only matters though when owners know about it.
Perhaps a warning message including the manual release procedure at the very first sign of trouble with the Tesla battery could be beneficial. It’s worth noting too that other automakers follow a similar pattern so who is really to blame here? Personally I think despite Tesla’s other faults, the brand is not to blame in this scenario.
We got all this from Carscoops and their full article is linked here. Thank you Carscoops for the information and images.
