“You couldn’t open the doors.”
Horrific End
Four people were killed in Toronto after the Tesla they were riding in crashed into a pillar and burst into flames.
A fifth rider, an unidentified woman in her twenties, narrowly survived the crash after a bystander smashed open a window, allowing her to escape the burning vehicle.
According to the heroic bystander’s account, the Tesla Model Y’s electronic doors may have been at fault for why the passengers were trapped inside the electric vehicle.
“You couldn’t open the doors,” the rescuer, Rick Harper, told the Toronto Star in a new interview. “I would assume the young lady would have tried to open the door from the inside, because she was pretty desperate to get out.” Harper added that he didn’t realize there were others trapped inside because the smoke was so thick.
“I don’t know if that was the battery or what,” Harper said. “But she couldn’t get out.”
Death Trap
Police said the crash, which took place on October 24, occurred after the driver lost control of the vehicle, struck a guardrail, and then slammed into a pillar, per the CBC, catching fire upon impact.
Authorities are still investigating the crash and fire. But the details that we have so far implicate to some degree the electronic doors used by Tesla and other automakers, which require power to open.
The Elon Musk-owned automaker has a troubling history of owners getting locked in their cars without power. Some of these cases may be down to user error, since most Teslas come with manual release levers.
However, these emergency measures have been criticized for being poorly designed and unintuitively placed for certain models, often requiring intimate knowledge of the car — something that most owners, let alone a passenger in a panic, aren’t likely to have.
Moreover, with the Model Y in particular, not all vehicles come with manual releases for the rear doors, as Tesla warns in the car’s manual. It’s unclear if the Model Y involved in the crash was equipped with the emergency feature.
Fire Hazard
This isn’t the first time that occupants have died after being allegedly trapped in a Tesla.
In 2019, a father of five was burned alive in his Model S after the car’s auto-retracting door handles failed to deploy, his family alleged in a lawsuit, preventing bystanders and first responders from setting him free from the intense blaze.
Another driver nearly suffered the same fate in 2021. When his Tesla Model S caught fire, he claimed he was briefly stuck inside due to the vehicle’s malfunctioning high tech door handles, though he eventually managed to escape.
Considering that EV battery fires are some of the most formidable out there and often take tens of thousands of gallons of water and hours of work to extinguish, a reliable way of getting out of one of these vehicles in a pinch is the least you could ask for.
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