Four dead in fire as Tesla doors fail to open after crash

Just calling out the poor way this (and many) articles write about car accidents. I’m not a Tesla fan at all but blaming Tesla for the crash is incorrect.

(It is correct to blame them for the way the door locks work though and therefore can be blamed for the excess injuries/deaths that result from the design decision.)

From the article:

> Four people were killed in a fire after a Tesla Model Y lost control and hit a pillar in Toronto last month.

> Five people were trapped inside a Tesla Model Y after it crashed and burst into flames The Tesla didn’t lose control, the human driver lost control of the vehicle.

From a previous article the day after:

> Police said the driver of the Tesla lost control of the vehicle while travelling at a high rate of speed and collided with a guard rail. The vehicle then struck a concrete pillar, they said, before bursting into flames.

If it wasn’t for the irresponsible driving on the part of the human driver, this incident wouldn’t have occurred in the first place. The driver paid for this with their and others’ lives.

>It is correct to blame them for the way the door locks work though and therefore can be blamed for the excess injuries/deaths that result from the design decision.

This is what is being discussed here: that four people burned to death because they were unable to exit the vehicle.

It's not entirely fair to say it happened in a vacuum, either, since car doors are damaged and fail-shut enough that almost every fire department has hydraulic rescue tools to force open trapped cars.

The spontaneous combustion of Tesla's battery pack was the proximal cause of death here, but that's an EV problem in general, and will probably only grow as they take over the car market.

Maybe we need the car version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUBSAFE to account for EV combustion risks that prevent FDs from responding in time for locked doors.

And they had survived the impact, and were capable of, but unable to, exit.

It's not correct to blame them for the way the door locks work. This is the case on all electronic door handles, now becoming common on new cars. The reason you can't have an emergency manual override easily accessible is that a child could use it when child lock is enabled. The US government created this problem.