Disclosure: I work for a car company, not on this.
If you want to be prepared for automotive incidents:
1. Check your mood and intoxication level before and while driving. Mood is more important than everything besides drugs and alcohol.
2. Left turns (or across traffic as applicable) are dangerous. Take extra care while turning left (or across traffic).
3. Using screens at night is bad for everyone, but especially above the age of 40, both focus and iris (light balance) response take longer. Using a screen changes your focus and blows out your night vision.
4. If your car has pushbutton electronic door openers, PRACTICE opening the door without battery power.
The good news is that at least as it pertains to getting rid of physical controls, automakers have largely learned their lesson and are trying to go back as fast as reasonably possible (while also trying to balance recouping the tooling costs from fewer buttons). VW was heavily heavily criticized and is bringing it all back.
I’m confident that if consumer sentiment starts to skew one way regarding electronic door handles, we will also see a reversal. What is unfortunate now is that other automakers are following the lead that Tesla set. Tesla essentially proved one type of electronic door and it is engineered in such a way to be cheap and reliable enough. I’m confident that if engineers are given the space to really innovate and explore ideas, they can find something that is both better mechanically while remaining highly aerodynamic.
> VW was heavily heavily criticized and is bringing it all back.
ID.BUZZ with physical controls would be my dream car, no joke.
Currently the main issues for me are the shitty touch buttons and underpowered heater (it's the same as in the ID.4, which has like 30% of the interior volume of the BUZZ...)
I have no idea, don’t own a Tesla and haven’t been in one that often.
Looks like some models might have the manual door release switch easily accessible in the front but not in the back, about what you’d expect from Tesla.
At least the fact that they have a decent solution shows that there’s no reason this has to be a problem for electric doors.
It's not a bad feature. My fancy car has them, and it can watch for traffic and stop/slow you opening the door if there's a car coming up that maybe you didn't see (or look for).
And on mine, the same handle that you push to open with electricity will also open manually if you pull it twice. Which is handy, because the 12v battery failed in the first year. Feels like 12v batteries are a lot less reliable lately.
Getting in from the outside with the manual handle isn't so obvious, it's kind of hidden at the back of the handle.
>3. Using screens at night is bad for everyone, but especially above the age of 40, both focus and iris (light balance) response take longer. Using a screen changes your focus and blows out your night vision.
On that note, if anyone with Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, et al. would like to revisit the way their apps handle ride assignment - specifically, the way platforms generally refuse to assign orders when the car is stationary, but then inundate contractors with notifications that must be responded to immediately when the car is in motion - it'd be much appreciated.
One of my pet peeves about screen UIs is that they're worse than they need to be for night use. Modern dark themes are blue-heavy, which negatively impacts both pupil response and bleaching more than colors of the same luminance with more green and red.
There should be two dark modes: a simple dark mode, like most dark themes today, to work in dimmed lighting, and an actual night mode, designed to be legible but not mess with adaptation in total darkness. I don't know the research on this (and I'm sure military and aviation have lots of data here), but intuitively it should use mostly thin red and green lines.
Some cars (Honda Civic) had this feature where you could change the theme of the UI and it had 3-4 presets (blue, red, amber, green IIRC). That was before those screens were just a built-in Android tablet and sadly it didn't carry over.
But you're right and it's the reason most german cars had red illuminated gauge clusters until a few years ago.
Funnily enough the first comment in the article is "oh yeah, if you're in Tesla good fucking luck, their doors fail and the releases are incredibly hard to find in emergency"
> Use caution when using the manual door release; the window will not automatically lower when the door is opened and damage to the window or vehicle trim may occur.
Manually opening the rear doors is a destructive operation!
Is it actually "destructive" or is it more of a "cramming the door seal over the window and flexing the widow assembly in a way that would result in more failure under warranty than they want if done regularly" type thing.
I think that's exactly what they recently got sued for. Car caught fire, electrical stopped working (and therefore the doors stopped working) and a teen burned inside
It's wild how my car won't let me change basic settings while vehicle is in drive (too much menu nav as to be distraction & I've had cars that would only let me edit the navigation destination while in park) yet - this exists as well
You're forgetting the "people who don't care, they just want to be seen looking like they care so they make a bunch of noise" factor.
Once you multiply the safety problem by the this factor it all makes sense.
A small non-problem that every screeching jerk will be exposed to is a bigger actual problem more likely to get addressed than a potential real problem that will mostly go unnoticed.
Also rear doors are kinda optional. They still make 2door 2-row cars. Heck, they made 2-door 2-row SUVs pretty recently. And child safety locks are a thing. So there is an argument to be made there (not that I think it holds up on modern stuff).
The front ones vary and certain models are atrociously designed. If you get in an accident and have a concussion, and adrenaline, add a 10x difficulty factor
This is almost certainly what killed those kids in piedmont
I didn't find them hard to find (in the front seat). When I first got my car it kept complaining because I instinctively reached for that lever instead of the button. The computer claimed I could break the window if I kept using the manual lever, and I had to figure out where the button was.
Not saying the car is great, just that I found the door lever easily. I'd still rather have real controls (and a real sensor) for the wipers and the reliance on software and software updates makes me very nervous. You can't even open the glove box without a voice command or touch screen (as far as I can tell).
A better design would be for the 'button' to be a normal lever in the normal location, and the emergency manual release to be triggered by pulling that lever extra hard.
There is no wrong way to open the door. Any suffering on the owner's part is caused by the manufacturer building the car that way. A car like that clearly isn't meant to carry untrained passengers. If the car owner insists on buying an unsuitable car, then that's on the owner. It's no different from buying a two seat sports car as a family of four.
Regarding screens: also make sure to configure the brightness correctly! I was recently driving with a relative in their new car at night, and the screen for navigation etc. was bright enough that I could see noticeably less than I'm used to. Turns out the screen does have separate brightness settings for day & night, but the night setting was at 4/10 per default (compared to 6/10 for the day setting). After lowering it to 1/10 the screen is still easily readable, and suddenly it's easy to see dark stuff again!
Any mood intense enough is extremely distracting and dangerous for driving, whether anger, infatuation, mourning, etc.
Because of this some countries have psychological testing to check your emotional stability when you get your license renewed, but realistically your emotions will be compromised for short durations much more often than that.
The test is a long term ( 15-30 minutes ) strict focus test. You don't have time to fully check everything you do on it, so you do your best and the psychologist verifies both that you have a sufficient ability to focus as a % of tasks reasonably responded to, and that you don't have large "emotional gaps" in your responses where your mind wandered to your bonnie for 45 seconds and you didn't interact with the tasks much or at all.
If you want to be prepared for automotive incidents:
1. Check your mood and intoxication level before and while driving. Mood is more important than everything besides drugs and alcohol.
2. Left turns (or across traffic as applicable) are dangerous. Take extra care while turning left (or across traffic).
3. Using screens at night is bad for everyone, but especially above the age of 40, both focus and iris (light balance) response take longer. Using a screen changes your focus and blows out your night vision.
4. If your car has pushbutton electronic door openers, PRACTICE opening the door without battery power.