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Door handles are pretty simple. You pull a handle inside or outside your car, a cable or rod linkage releases the latch, and the door opens. That is, unless it’s a Tesla. Tesla’s doors are electronic, and open by pressing a button on the inside or touching the exterior handle. This is all well and good until the car loses electrical power, and these systems don’t work. People have died trapped inside burning Teslas because nobody could open the doors.
Tesla does provide manual door releases to be used if the power goes out. While documented in the owner’s manual, these are not always intuitive to use or clearly marked, particularly in the back seats. This makes them difficult to find and use in an emergency, when seconds count and could mean the difference between life and death.
Owners and the aftermarket have come up with their own solutions to this problem that shouldn’t really be a problem. The back doors’ manual releases, in particular, are so hidden and cumbersome that people are attaching emergency rip cords to them, making them faster and easier to find in an emergency. Rather than going through a cumbersome three-step process in the Cybertruck, occupants can just pull on a cord to open the door, which is how they should have been designed in the first place.
How the rip cords work
The process to open back doors manually in a Tesla generally involves opening a hidden cover in the door pocket (sometimes it’s labeled, sometimes it’s not), then pulling on the end of a hidden cable. Unless you already know exactly what to look for, chances are you’re not going to find it when your adrenaline is pumping in a car that is burning or sinking in water.
The rip cords solve this problem by attaching to the end of this hidden cable, then sitting in the map pocket in an obvious way. Now, all an occupant has to do is pull on the cord and the door opens even if the power is out, just like every other car on the road. The aftermarket has some solutions available, like this one by Tesery and this one by EV Dynamics, selling for $15 to $25. These examples are specifically for the Model Y, so be sure to look for solutions for your particular model. You can even make your own, but please make it sturdy and not some collection of zip-ties. I recommend a motorcycle key tag that says, “What do we say to the god of death? Not today.”
It didn’t have to be this way
Why would Tesla abandon over 100 years of proven mechanical door latch technology to use something more complicated and less reliable? It all comes down to one person: Elon Musk.
Power retractable door handles and electric latches have been a distinctive Tesla “feature” since the original Model S. According to Wired, the entire executive staff thought the idea was ludicrous, the answer to a question nobody asked, and didn’t like it at all. Their objections fell upon deaf ears as Musk insisted they do it anyway. It would become one of Tesla’s best-known features, both because of its gee-whiz technology and its initially poor reliability and wrongful death lawsuits.
To be fair, Tesla is no longer the only manufacturer using electronic door latches with a mechanical manual override. Audi, BMW, Chevy, Fiat, Fisker, Ford, Genesis, Lexus, Lincoln, Lucid, Maserati, and Rivian have also implemented them in recent models. But would they have felt the need to keep up with the Joneses if Tesla hadn’t done it first?