“You couldn’t open the doors.”

Terrible End

Four people killed in Toronto Tesla’s They hit a pillar and burst into flames.

The fifth driver, an unidentified woman in her twenties, narrowly escaped the crash after a bystander broke a window, allowing her to escape the burning vehicle.

The Tesla Model Y’s electronic doors may have been at fault for trapping passengers inside the electric vehicle, according to a heroic eyewitness account.

“You couldn’t open the doors,” rescuer Rick Harper said. told Toronto Star in a new interview. “I assume the young lady tried to open the door from the inside because she was quite desperate to get out.” Harper added that he didn’t realize anyone else was trapped inside because the smoke was so thick.

“I don’t know if it’s the battery or something else,” Harper said. “But he couldn’t get out.”

Death Trap

Police said the crash, which occurred on Oct. 24, occurred when the driver lost control of the vehicle, hit a guardrail and then crashed into a pole. per CBCIt catches fire on impact.

Authorities continue their investigation into the accident and fire. But the details we have so far point to some degree of electronic doors used by Tesla and other automakers, which require power to open.

The automaker owned by Elon Musk troubled history recipients They locked their cars without power. Since most Teslas come with manual release levers, some of these situations may be due to user error.

However, these urgent measures Criticized for being poorly designed And Unintuitively placed for certain models, it often requires detailed knowledge of the car; This is something most vehicle owners would not have, let alone a panicked passenger.

Moreover, not all vehicles, especially Model Y, have a manual unlocking feature for the rear doors. As Tesla warns in the car’s manual. It is unclear whether the Model Y involved in the crash was equipped with an emergency feature.

Fire Hazard

This is not the first death of passengers allegedly trapped in a Tesla.

In 2019, a father of five was burned alive in his Model S after the car’s automatically retracting door handles failed to open. alleged in a lawsuitpreventing bystanders and first responders from rescuing him from the intense fire.

another driver suffered almost the same fate He claimed that when his Tesla Model S caught fire, he was briefly trapped inside due to a malfunction in the vehicle’s high-tech door handles, but he eventually managed to escape.

EV battery fires some of the toughest out there and although extinguishing it often requires tens of thousands of gallons of water and hours of labor, a reliable way to get rid of one of these vehicles in a hurry is the least you could want.

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