A poorly designed electronic door latch in the Tesla Model Y may be to blame for these deaths.
The automotive industry has been moving towards electrification over the last 10 years and while there are MANY benefits, many (including us) have warned repeatedly about the hidden dangers. One such danger came to light late last month when four friends tragically died in a fire after their Tesla Model Y crashed, reportedly disabling the car’s electronic doors. The only survivor, a woman in her 20s, managed to escape after passerby smashed a window with a metal pole, allowing her to crawl to safety. The victims were Neelraj Gohil, 25, his sister Ketaba Gohil, 29, Jay Sisodiya, and Digvijay Patel. The survivor recounted that she couldn’t open the doors from inside the vehicle.
For those who are unaware of how the Tesla Model Y’s door handle is shaped, here’s an example:
As you can see, it’s not really a door handle – it’s a button that releases the door latch electronically. But what if there’s a failure of this system and the passengers need to get out?
Not to worry, as there’s a manual door release just south of that…
Yes, in the race to turn cars into consumer electronics, Tesla has “re-invented the wheel” and fitted an ‘electronic latch’ as well as a manual release should that e-latch fail. In the mind of their engineers (or perhaps Elon Musk himself), this should be a bulletproof design, right? However, in the real world, what this approach does is it creates an unnecessary and dangerous knowledge gap.
This design assumes that a passenger who may not know anything about cars, let alone Teslas, will understand where the manual override is located. In fact, on forums there’s clear evidence that some owners aren’t aware of the presence of this manual override:
We can assume that many Tesla owners and people who just so happen to be passengers in Tesla vehicles don’t know about this manual override lever. After all, Tesla vehicles like the Model Y are some of the safest in crash tests and at least one of the doors should have been able to swing open in a crash. Could it be that in the incident above, the owner or driver who may have known about the manual override was unconscious thus unable to provide that information to the conscious passengers?
A Better Electronic Latch Design
Now I’m not anti-technology. If you read any one of my EV reviews (links at the bottom of this article), you’ll see that I actually do think EVs have some objectively good qualities to them. I’m not even anti-electronic door latch, but this was clearly not a very good design. Lexus has implemented an ‘e-latch’ design of their own that is at least intuitive:
In the Lexus e-latch design, you push the indented area to release the latch and the manual override is the same exact lever, just pulled instead of pushed. In my experience, most passengers go to ‘pull’ the lever by default and only push it after being instructed that it’s possible to do that as well. The Tesla design puts the gimmick first and hides the safety override.
What can Tesla do?
This is a company known for fixing problems via OTA updates. It is part of their business model and it is a selling point that the cars get better with software updates. Perhaps two updates they can test and then push out is:
- a fail-safe system that forces all doors to electronically unlatch in the event of a crash, once the accelerometers confirm that the car is stationary
- an auditory message in multiple languages that reminds passengers of the location of the safety latch in the event of a crash
- using ambient lighting to strobe and highlight the location of the manual override in the event of a crash
