The emergency handles on the front doors are nicely made and well positioned in a familiar/intuitive location. Why did Tesla camouflage them and add separate electronic release buttons instead of simply integrating the electronic triggers into the mechanical handles?
The emergency handle requires a pretty long pull to finally release so they could have easily designed it to trigger the electronic release with the slightest pull such that the window sequence could still activate in time even if the handle was pulled all the way fairly quickly.
Style and ergonomics aside, there is a safety aspect to this that has always bothered me. Passengers may not know about the emergency handle as it's fairly well disguised and even the owner is likely to forget about it in a panic. I can certainly imagine someone buying an old Tesla on Craigslist and driving it for years without ever knowing about the release handle. That guy who was stuck in his own Cadillac clearly didn't know/remember the emergency release and while the Tesla handle is easier to find, it still needs to be found.
So now we have the Plaid S being delivered with a critical flaw that causes a complete shutdown of the 12V system and at least two of the first owners have had to use the mechanical handles to escape - one would have died had he not found the emergency handle as quickly as he did. They'll find the cause of these 12V failures and get all the cars updated promptly but there will surely be other 12V failures in the future accompanied by life-threatening fires/floods/etc. and one of these times someone is going to fail to find the emergency handle.
At some point in the Model 3 design stage a bunch of engineers gathered in a conference room for a PowerPoint presentation of the proposed handle design and surely someone must have asked:
"Wait, why do we need two separate release systems in two different locations? Can't they just be combined for better aesthetics, ergonomics, cost, and safety?"
Surely they discussed the safety implications of their decision to camouflage the emergency handle to prevent damage from accidental use.
"Wait, we're going to deliberately try to hide the emergency release?"
Surely they all knew about the Cadillac story and the many negative forum posts regarding the 3/Y emergency handles long before they even started designing the Plaid, yet they implemented the same system in the S refresh.
Why would they do that?
The emergency handle requires a pretty long pull to finally release so they could have easily designed it to trigger the electronic release with the slightest pull such that the window sequence could still activate in time even if the handle was pulled all the way fairly quickly.
Style and ergonomics aside, there is a safety aspect to this that has always bothered me. Passengers may not know about the emergency handle as it's fairly well disguised and even the owner is likely to forget about it in a panic. I can certainly imagine someone buying an old Tesla on Craigslist and driving it for years without ever knowing about the release handle. That guy who was stuck in his own Cadillac clearly didn't know/remember the emergency release and while the Tesla handle is easier to find, it still needs to be found.
So now we have the Plaid S being delivered with a critical flaw that causes a complete shutdown of the 12V system and at least two of the first owners have had to use the mechanical handles to escape - one would have died had he not found the emergency handle as quickly as he did. They'll find the cause of these 12V failures and get all the cars updated promptly but there will surely be other 12V failures in the future accompanied by life-threatening fires/floods/etc. and one of these times someone is going to fail to find the emergency handle.
At some point in the Model 3 design stage a bunch of engineers gathered in a conference room for a PowerPoint presentation of the proposed handle design and surely someone must have asked:
"Wait, why do we need two separate release systems in two different locations? Can't they just be combined for better aesthetics, ergonomics, cost, and safety?"
Surely they discussed the safety implications of their decision to camouflage the emergency handle to prevent damage from accidental use.
"Wait, we're going to deliberately try to hide the emergency release?"
Surely they all knew about the Cadillac story and the many negative forum posts regarding the 3/Y emergency handles long before they even started designing the Plaid, yet they implemented the same system in the S refresh.
Why would they do that?