this vehicle was travelling over 200km/hr. It hit a cement barrier. That car could have been made of bubble wrap, it wasnt going to be pretty, no matter what.
The car looked like this after burning to a crisp. That’s a survivable wreck any day of the week (assuming seatbelts and airbags were in working order) but of course for the burning. The story says they hit a guard rail and eventually a cement pillar. Given the image, it doesn’t look like it was a head on collision and the passenger compartment is still in its original shape, so they were not likely to have been doing 200 kph by the time they hit the cement pillar. Guard rails (and I know this from experience with an unfortunate black ice incident that harmed nobody) will slow a car down quite a bit in not a whole lot of time, they’re not just there for show. My experience totalled the car, but it saved my whole family’s life by getting us down from 65 mph to 0 mph safely and in a very short period of time. It was shocking to see how short the deceleration had been once we drove past it in the daylight the following day and saw the tiny marks in the shoulder and the railing from our crash.
Crucially, one of the occupants of this Tesla crash did in fact survive, which makes it pretty clear what the survivability of the crash was. The fact is that people on the scene couldn’t get the car open from the outside and people that probably would have had a chance at otherwise being saved, burned to a crisp. You can say that the 125mph made it so they were doomed any way you look at it, but there were rescuers on the scene trying to get people out and the one person they managed to get out did in fact survive, so it’s probably disingenuous to claim that the battery fire and egress issues didn’t have anything to do with the deaths.
I’m not anti EV. My primary ride is an EV these days and I love it enough to say that everyone should drive an EV if they can manage, but claiming that the speed involved meant anyone in any vehicle would have met the same fate is probably not squaring with the reality here. The rescuer who saved the one passenger was surprised later that 4 other people had died, he claimed that it was hard to see other passengers in the car because of the thick smoke inside. I’m not saying that standard mechanical door handles would have saved the day for those 4, but it certainly seems like the lack thereof didn’t help, the battery fire component certainly made a bad situation worse, and the Model Y’s “unbreakable” laminate glass windows probably also pushed the equation more towards deadly than dangerous. I’ll admit that the press loves to bag on an EV, but there are legit dangers with battery damage and Tesla isn’t doing any favors for addressing them by making manual egress more difficult than it has to be with their design choices.
Just one thing I’d like to point out, it looks like that, sure. Notice how it’s missing the entire B pillar? That didn’t burn off, they had to do extensive cutting.
The accident was at high speed. That car is mangled. This is the press making a very big deal out of facts that aren’t entirely straight (there’s no way to open the doors manually! - when there is), and it’s heavily reliant on the words of a 74 year old man who’s feeding into this. It’s definitely food for thought, but it’s also a lot of hysteria. That car is hella bent, the doors probably weren’t opening regardless of the door mechanisms, and yeah EVs require a different approach to fighting their fires. Fossil fuel powered cars burn too, eh? And they can be a real bitch to put out as well, people burn alive in them too.
Regardless of the arguments, it sucks that people had to die here. I think it speaks well to the safety of the vehicle though, that someone survived. I do agree on the glass, but there’s a whole lot of vehicles that use that type of glass, so again Tesla takes the beating meanwhile half the manufacturers today use it. Everyone wants whisper quiet interiors, so that sound insulation has to come from somewhere.
The car looked like this after burning to a crisp. That’s a survivable wreck any day of the week (assuming seatbelts and airbags were in working order) but of course for the burning. The story says they hit a guard rail and eventually a cement pillar. Given the image, it doesn’t look like it was a head on collision and the passenger compartment is still in its original shape, so they were not likely to have been doing 200 kph by the time they hit the cement pillar. Guard rails (and I know this from experience with an unfortunate black ice incident that harmed nobody) will slow a car down quite a bit in not a whole lot of time, they’re not just there for show. My experience totalled the car, but it saved my whole family’s life by getting us down from 65 mph to 0 mph safely and in a very short period of time. It was shocking to see how short the deceleration had been once we drove past it in the daylight the following day and saw the tiny marks in the shoulder and the railing from our crash.
Crucially, one of the occupants of this Tesla crash did in fact survive, which makes it pretty clear what the survivability of the crash was. The fact is that people on the scene couldn’t get the car open from the outside and people that probably would have had a chance at otherwise being saved, burned to a crisp. You can say that the 125mph made it so they were doomed any way you look at it, but there were rescuers on the scene trying to get people out and the one person they managed to get out did in fact survive, so it’s probably disingenuous to claim that the battery fire and egress issues didn’t have anything to do with the deaths.
I’m not anti EV. My primary ride is an EV these days and I love it enough to say that everyone should drive an EV if they can manage, but claiming that the speed involved meant anyone in any vehicle would have met the same fate is probably not squaring with the reality here. The rescuer who saved the one passenger was surprised later that 4 other people had died, he claimed that it was hard to see other passengers in the car because of the thick smoke inside. I’m not saying that standard mechanical door handles would have saved the day for those 4, but it certainly seems like the lack thereof didn’t help, the battery fire component certainly made a bad situation worse, and the Model Y’s “unbreakable” laminate glass windows probably also pushed the equation more towards deadly than dangerous. I’ll admit that the press loves to bag on an EV, but there are legit dangers with battery damage and Tesla isn’t doing any favors for addressing them by making manual egress more difficult than it has to be with their design choices.
Just one thing I’d like to point out, it looks like that, sure. Notice how it’s missing the entire B pillar? That didn’t burn off, they had to do extensive cutting.
Also this is how it looked from a side view: https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/10/24/four-dead-electric-vehicle-crash-toronto/amp/
The accident was at high speed. That car is mangled. This is the press making a very big deal out of facts that aren’t entirely straight (there’s no way to open the doors manually! - when there is), and it’s heavily reliant on the words of a 74 year old man who’s feeding into this. It’s definitely food for thought, but it’s also a lot of hysteria. That car is hella bent, the doors probably weren’t opening regardless of the door mechanisms, and yeah EVs require a different approach to fighting their fires. Fossil fuel powered cars burn too, eh? And they can be a real bitch to put out as well, people burn alive in them too.
Regardless of the arguments, it sucks that people had to die here. I think it speaks well to the safety of the vehicle though, that someone survived. I do agree on the glass, but there’s a whole lot of vehicles that use that type of glass, so again Tesla takes the beating meanwhile half the manufacturers today use it. Everyone wants whisper quiet interiors, so that sound insulation has to come from somewhere.