This requires a redesign…
by Wallace Wyss –
The headline was announced that four people had died recently in Toronto in a burning Tesla and were unable to be rescued because the doors, with their hidden door handles, stayed resolutely locked, I was shocked.
The handles, set into slots so they are flush to the body just like the ones on my old ’54 Gullwing Mercedes, were the styling marvel of the car, one of Franz von Holhausen’s brilliant achievements. Until they weren’t.
I had read individual reports earlier of children locked in a Tesla on a hot day, and the doors refused to open but now that four people died in a Tesla because the system locked them in, I think it’s time for a re-design and maybe retrofit, or at least an emergency way for rescuers to help. It didn’t make it easier that the Lithium battery fire couldn’t be put out with ordinary extinguishers.
I always thought that Elon Musk was brilliant in being able to sell cars designed more than a dozen years ago with the same-old same-old body style, avoiding retooling costs, not like when Harley Earl at GM shamed you if your tailfins were too short. You hadda get a new Caddy or look too poor to up-grade.
And I love minimalist styling, the “make no fancy statement” philosophy espoused by the Bauhaus School in Germany before the war. I love it until it proves dangerous. And deadly. This is an egregious design flaw.
Am I saying recall millions of Teslas? They could develop an emergency door opener mechanism that can be retrofitted. But certainly Elon Musk, who hasn’t yet taken a US government position, needs to take time to revisit this handle re-design or if there’s more such fires, gain the sad reputation of building cars that cook people.
Let us know what you think in the Comments.
THE AUTHOR In 1965, Wallace Wyss worked on publicizing safety research at Wayne State University, his alma mater.
Battery electrics a la Musk are an intermediate technology. Musk fears hydrogen fuel cell electrics which is why Trump spoke negatively about hydrogen vehicles. Musk will do his best to ‘throttle’ hydrogen electric progress.
Just sayin’
Has there ever been a study on how much more pollution from burning electric cars cause over ICE car usage? Or how much more pollution is caused by burning ICE cars since the introduction of the catalytic converter, and its ethonal based fuels that eat rubber fuel lines? I think we have been going backwards with all this nonsense. And what ever is done here in California, should be done globally. I’m tired of towing the load for the rest of the World.