Some things should just stay mechanical, and car door handles are one of them. The packaging benefits are not worth the danger it creates for consumers.

Electric doors are a horrible idea.

This:

reason #1 I will never own a Tesla. I do not trust the doors to ever actually open

BAN electric only indoor handles. It’s really stupid. The auto maker has to install a secondary release cable anyways, and then they go hide it somewhere. In some Teslas it’s behind the speaker grille or hidden in the door pocket which will probably be full of junk. An interior door needs to have one single handle…

But it’s just adding another layer of complexity and confusion to emergency situations for no reason. It doesn’t matter is some cars do get mechanically disabled or blocked. And even if in those cases when it happens it’s highly unlikely to happen to all of the doors. 

It’s clearly pure form over function to an objectively dangerous degree. 

I’ve long thought electric door latches are a solution in search of a problem. Doubly stupid because you still need a manual latch, so now you need two latches. 

If you have to have a mechanism built into the door for manual release anyway, why the hell not just have the door handle use that to open in the first place instead of connecting to an electrical system?

That only makes the decision to have electric door latches and completely hiding the manual releases all the more dumb knowing that they have caused people to die needlessly in the past.

I mean, he might want to secretly murder people.

No, he just doesn’t care if he does.

My only experience is a front end collision that bent the car bad enough the trunk didn’t work right. Drivers door let me out just fine. If a 2004 Mitsubishi could do that, why can't this? Does elmo want to murder people?

They did know. They simply didn’t care.

It doesn’t even matter if another car maker made the same dumb choice. It’s still dumb and dangerous no matter who is doing it.

I’ve only ridden in a Tesla once, in the back seat of an Uber. Besides it being uncomfortable with no room under the seat for my toes, I couldn’t figure out how to open the door from the inside. How did anybody not notice this might be a problem?

Do they also go out of their way to hide the manual release and make it blend into the rest of the interior with not so much as a sticker or embossed image indicating what/where it is?

“most Teslas come with manual release levers.” That’s a scary thought. How is it that carmakers need to have glow-in-the-dark emergency release handles for trunks, but not something similarly for electrically controlled door handles?

Teslas are deathtraps and everyone buying one is signing their own death certificate and funding fascism.

Thank God Tesla came along to save us from the horrors of manual door handles. If not for their work, imagine the terrors we would be forced to endure.