There's no reason for it to be as ugly and huge as an aircraft emergency exit -- it's certainly possible to make a beautiful door handle that can detect if that the regular/electronic door opening system isn't working and then activate an alternate system to open the door.

As detailed in this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14188425 , the problem isn't the visibility of the handle, it's that speaker-grill Bowden cable release was, afaict, never meant as an emergency mechanism, it was simply meant for service/maintenance tasks.

Well, that would make things even worse for Tesla. To think that the door mechanism would always work if it requires the 12V to be operational is simply silly.

You're arguing against human nature. When someone pays a lot of money for a luxury car, they want it to look good. Having a big red handle visible inside the car would be a huge turnoff for people.

If you design car doors so they no longer work the way people expect it you have to compensate for that somehow so that in an emergency situation if the door is not blocked or otherwise deformed so that it could still be opened it can be opened without instruction or delay.

What ever method you choose should satisfy those conditions. If you can't come up with a viable alternative to big red handle (which is the accepted norm for emergency only door openers the world over) then maybe you simply should let go of your fancy door design.

But other manufacturers than Tesla seem to be able to make this work just fine so at a guess I'm not arguing against human nature, merely against you. Note that making a car door work has been a solved problem since roughly the 1930's.

> Note that making a car door work has been a solved problem since roughly the 1930's.

This is not the first time someone's been unable to open a car door after a high-speed crash.

In fact, nothing in the article even tells us whether the emergency open handle would have worked, or whether the problem was the car frame was deformed enough to jam the doors.

How many times will you move the goalposts in a single conversation?

Nothing in the article relates whether or not they ate ice-cream either. But the fact is that the door did not open because of power failure and that the handle was placed in such a way that a mechanical option to open the door was obscured from the passengers. if the handle would have been exposed and the door would have been jammed you would have a point. But hiding behind information that doesn't matter either way is a pretty weak defense.

I'll leave it at that. Hopefully if and when the time comes and you find yourself in an accident in a model X you and your passengers will remember to look behind the speaker grille.

> How many times will you move the goalposts in a single conversation?

You completely missing my point isn't moving the goalposts, and it's kind of offensive to have you dismiss my comment like that.

> But the fact is that the door did not open because of power failure

No, we don't know that. The article didn't say it was because of a power failure. It just said they didn't open. That was the whole point of my comment, that you're making an assumption as to why it didn't open, but the article didn't say why it didn't open, which means it could very well have been due to a cause that would cause all other car doors to also fail to open (namely, the frame bending).

> but the article didn't say why it didn't open, which means it could very well have been due to a cause that would cause all other car doors to also fail to open (namely, the frame bending).

The article states that the rear-seat occupants "managed to exit through the front door" -- with no mention of any problems with opening the front doors. I think this means that the front doors opened just fine; likely due to the reinforcements around the doors/pillars, as shown on page 19 of http://assets.teslastatic.com/2016_Model_X_Emergency_Respons... doing their job.

The accident allowed the front doors to still be opened (in the usual way) and the rear doors did not work because pressing the button did not activate the door opening mechanism. Note that the gull wing doors are the rear doors. Now if any door would be stuck after an accident that deformed the chassis to the point that the front doors would not open you could speculate that the rear doors also would not open. But the front doors worked just fine strongly suggesting that the failure was - as has been described - due to the rear doors requiring power rather than just a mechanical release.

So, 'all other car doors' (of this particular car) opened just fine, it is just the gull wing doors that did not open making it rather hard to believe that the chassis was that deformed.

And even if the chassis was deformed that would be one reason more to provide for some kind of emergency escape measure to avoid being trapped in a car which is a very bad place to be after an accident and cars do get into accidents every now and then.

Why I said you were moving the goalposts: first you argued at length that aesthetics were the main reason this problem couldn't be solved, then you went for the fact that the doors might have jammed without any evidence for that, in fact with strong evidence to the contrary. Since this was a head on collision you'd expect the front of the car to have taken the brunt of the impact and that if the front doors were jammed chassis deformation could be assumed to the point where the rear doors would be jammed as well.

But given the front is fine the rear should have opened. And if deformation of the car is possible where in a frontal collision the front doors will still open just fine but the rear doors will not then that's a huge design flaw.

Note how the article says the electrical release button did not work, that's pretty logical but probably not what the passengers expected.

So, we can go looking for complex explanations but really simple ones exist: electrical failure, quite common after an accident, and a really good thing too because you don't want to have an electrical fire such as the one in the article on top of a car accident, doors don't open, emergency release invisible to the point of non-existence -> problem.

Fortunately the people in the car had the quickness of mind and sufficient agility to try the front doors fast enough to get out, if not the story would have ended quite differently.

Some blogger predicted this could happen by the way:

http://www.thedrive.com/new-cars/1540/will-the-tesla-model-x...

> Why I said you were moving the goalposts

I wasn't moving the goalposts. I was pointing out that you were trying to argue for an untenable solution to a problem without actually having evidence that that was the real problem in the first place.

Look, the manual of the car details that failure mode, it was predicted this could happen, it is proven (by the manufacturer, in the instruction manual) that that failure mode exists and the people involved in the accidents testimony corroborates that the button was not working. If you want to bring in deformation of the frame to the point where the doors do not open into play then I think you should provide the evidence, everything else points to the simplest solution: electrical system failure. And trust me, you want that electrical system off, even if it is only the 12V battery it could turn a simple accident into a very bad one in a hurry. 12V batteries are more than capable of turning a bunch of wiring into a nice little fire starter. I've seen this up close and it's not pretty.

Note that Tesla would be absolutely horrified to learn that this accident did not allow the rear doors to be opened mechanically because they were jammed as that would indicate a structural un-soundness of their chassis design.

Note that EURO NCAP makes fairly explicit mention of whether or not doors can be opened after an accident and that that passenger compartment deformation is a huge factor in the rating a car gets.

Electrical problem + making a nice handle on the door for emergency release: fixable. Rear doors jammed after mild front impact -> back to the chassis drawing board, massive recall.

I'm not saying that you're wrong in believing that the cause was likely due to power failure. My point was that you didn't actually know that for a fact (and hadn't even made an argument for it being power failure, you simply assumed it without explanation). You're accusing me of moving the goalposts simply because I challenged an assumption you made.