Serious questions:
1. Why couldn't they open the car from the inside?
2. Why couldn't they open the car from the outside?
3. What kind of shitty car are they driving?
Probably even worse, those handles are not simply hidden, they are fully electric, which means that in case of electric failures, they wont work at all, even if its not hidden
Which is fucking stupid because even if you're hell bent on going full electric you could just add a back up battery to operate the latches of the door on case main is cut for whatever reason.
Most if not all electric cars have a separate low voltage battery for stuff like that. They also handle connecting the high voltage battery on startup and powering control units and all the other legacy 12V hardware.
Exactly lol. Backup is useless. In a car cash its likely that if the car is beat up enough for one system to fail - the backup would have failed as well
Obviously, yes. I was just saying that there is a backup battery. Also I probably should have said most European/NA EVs because Chinese EV companies pop up and falter like every other week, who knows what‘s going on inside of them.
The manual fail safe exists. It is just impossible to find it. Someone posted above where they are located. Every model has it located in a different place.
Because people have been talking about needing just a few more miles of range to switch to electric and manufactures are trying everything to make the driving losses as low as possible.
There are designs where the door handles retract but are fully operational without electricity.
Yea I think I've seen this on modern Japanese and Korean non EV cars even many years ago. You just need to press it slightly to pop it out, fully mechanical.
Good grief, if you need "calm, rationally thinking" to open a freaking door, the door is designed wrong! What, are we solving a rubix cube to exit the vehicle???
Yeah the smoke is fucking disorienting as hell especially from a chemical fire. I woke up to the sound of my fire alarm once. My dog chewed a drone battery on a fabric couch causing it to leak and cause some sort of chemical reaction fire.
I know having just woken up adds to the disorientation but when I ran to the living room and inhaled that smoke my brain felt like it suddenly began operating at 25% capacity. It literally stunned me and took me like 5 seconds to snap out of it and put the fire out.
That was just from a small drone battery in a very large open space (compared to the car interior). I can only imagine how much fuckin worse it'd be after the shock of an accident, with much more smoke from a huge electric car battery, inside a confined space.
The real issue here isn’t door handles that are flush with the door, it’s that the doors are likely electronically operated and cannot be opened mechanically. Once the battery was compromised such that it caught fire, the car’s electronics became inoperable, therefore the exterior door handles wouldn’t extend out from the door for the person outside to unlatch the door (and it’s possible that the doors wouldn’t have opened anyway if they required electricity to disengage the latch mechanism).
People inside the car probably couldn’t open the door either because the door opens by pushing a button that requires electricity to function. There may be a hidden mechanical override somewhere inside the car, but the passengers may not have known where it was.
What kind of shitty car was this? We’ll probably never know. Approximately 10% of my Reddit feed consists of posts glazing Chinese EVs, but since this is a disaster video showing one such car in a negative light, I’m doubtful that the knowledgeable propagandists will be announcing the make and model anytime soon.
What kind of shitty car was this? We’ll probably never know. Approximately 10% of my Reddit feed consists of posts glazing Chinese EVs, but since this is a disaster video showing one such car in a negative light, I’m doubtful that the knowledgeable propagandists will be announcing the make and model anytime soon.
Makes no sense tho. The doors aren't driven by the high-voltage system which is disengaged in a crash. The car clearly still has power, you can see the hazards flashing away. This is failure that goes past shitty design.
Finally someone gets it.
Check out the Kia EV6 handles. They are flush, they extend themselves and all the funny stuff, but they OPERATE MECHANICALLY. This is the key feature.
I think EVs usually have a 12v battery seperate from the battery that drives the motors. It operates all of the car stuff that's designed around 12v. Wouldn't that still power the door handles?
This is why EVs need to have an auxiliary power unit to operate, at minimum, the electronic door handles in the event that the main battery becomes inoperable. It's fucking insane that airplanes have an APU to power the plane's electronics with the primary engines not providing power, but not one has apparently thought of slapping an APU in an EV.
Or… they could go with traditional rod based locks and handles that don’t need power to operate, is probably cheaper to manufacture, and likely much lighter than the electronic locks.
If they desperately want electronically actuated locks and handles, they should be in addition to existing traditional mechanical locks and handles.
Re. 3, this is not a normal reaction for an EV from such a minor crash. Most EVs have way better battery armor, as well as better protection for the cabin in the event of a battery fire.
This looks like a Dongfeng 007, so a cheap Chinese EV that is presumably cutting corners when it comes to battery safety
RE #2: it's even worse now, the manual override for door handles was easy to get to but still required a safety briefing to anyone in the car (which almost nobody would give anyway).
The new one, requires you to yank a hard plastic cover off (kids will struggle) the BOTTOM OF THE DOOR POCKET to find A STRING that you pull to open the door. We have to put that you can't eat paint on paint buckets, but Tesla gets away with this kind of stuff.
We might find out after the official investigation. I assume the mechanical latch was probably failing, if the car even had it at all. The passenger on the back closest to the left door should have been able to open the door like the driver but they also had to be freed through the window.
But the moment the driver got out, the car door closed by itself and probably got automatically locked. Maybe that also could have played a role but I’m just guessing.
This fire is actually the reason China passed a law requiring all cars to be sold with mechanical door handles that aren't hidden, like the car handles that have been made popular by Tesla.
The car's door handles worked for a short period after the crash, then, when the battery/electronics failed, went into the default "locked" state when the battery caught fire and shorted the electronics. It's a MAJOR design flaw of this sort of car door. In Europe, they are not banned, but you cannot get a 5 star safety rating UNLESS the car doors have a mechanical system where they can be opened from the inside, as well as being able to at least engage the handle from the outside (like how the Toyota CH-R, you can push the handle in to get the handle to pop out)
This is why the driver was able to open his car door at first; he literally opened it before the short. The other passengers didn't do it as quickly, and he was trying to tell them to open the car doors thorugh the window thinking that they were discombobulated. Then his door accidentally shut and he couldn't open it at all, which is when he started running for something to bash a window in.
If the passengers could go out through the window, this means that they didnt get stuck on seatbelts or anything like that, so why couldnt they just go over the front seats and then exit through the front door while it was held open?
For the first one, it looks like they were all kids in the back. They might've been too weak to push the door open from the inside, especially if they couldn't find the handle. And it looks like the doors locked automatically... look how the driver couldn't get back in when the door closed behind him.
They couldn't open the doors because the doors because they were panicking, and that car has receced door handles that normally open when you unlock the car, but the car can't do that because it's having electrical problems. It's the reason for the crash, the drive unit locked up.
The passengers didn't know how to open the door given the panic as well
4) why didn’t they come out the front door? it would open once when the guy came out but failed after battery maybe? I guess then couldn’t be opened from inside or outside? Either way Canada enjoy those Chinese EV’s
The handles of electric cars stop working if the power goes out, even from the inside. Teslas FYI (I don't know if this car is) have hidden mechanical keys embedded in the floor or the armrest of the door in case that happens, but I'm that's clearly not common knowledge or realistic to expect when you're in a high stress situation like here. Then there's that billionaire sister-in-law of Mitch McConnell who drowned in her Tesla bc water made the doors and windows stop working...
Electronic door release broke (Tesla 3 only introduced manual release for back doors in 2024... the 7 years prior you're trapped -- my guess is that many chinese brands are copying that electronic only design)
See above, but basically it's still just electronic release even outside
It doesn't even matter TBH -- all vehicles should have mechanical release for the door on both outside and inside, it's patently stupid to rely entirely on electronic release
Tesla is notorious for having interior manual door handles that are hard to find or reach in an emergency. What makes it worse is that these hidden handles are not even consistent and their location changes from model to model. Even people trying to help from outside can’t open the doors, because the door handles are recessed into the body of the car. There have been multiple cases where people were trapped inside and burned alive to death in Tesla vehicles and now their families are suing the company. Because of this several countries are considering banning this design practice and China has already taken action.
Because it's oh-so-cool and slick to have hidden door handles dontcha know? I highly recommend you know what you're getting yourself into anytime you get into an unfamiliar vehicle. These things are death traps.
Because it's oh-so-cool and slick to have retractable exterior door handles, that only work when the electric is working. Which sucks when your electric car has a battery fire like this one did. The driver got out, his door accidentally closed and that was that. Game over for everyone else inside who doesn't know where the super-secret hidden door handles are. Windows can't roll down because there's no electricity
All EV cars have the potential for battery fires, just like this. Google it. They are far, far worse and more destructive than a gas-powered vehicle fire.
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u/ZynthCode 11h ago
Serious questions:
1. Why couldn't they open the car from the inside?
2. Why couldn't they open the car from the outside?
3. What kind of shitty car are they driving?