Comment by amiga386
8 hours ago
See also: China bans hidden car door handles over safety concerns
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp37g5nxe3lo
> It comes as EVs are facing scrutiny from safety watchdogs around the world after a number of deadly incidents, including two fatal crashes in China involving Xiaomi EVs in which power failures were suspected to have prevented doors from being opened.
You had one job, door handles... but being made sleek and sexy and unlike normal door handles also made you a fucking liability.
The video that made the rounds on Reddit yesterday really hits home how quickly an EV can become a death trap when the doors can no longer be opened from the outside
https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1qwfjuu/i...
People wonder "Why is there a law for this stupid thing, it's a regulatory hassle", and yet time and time again it comes around there was at least some partially legitimate reason said rule exists.
Simply put vehicles are at the point where we need a rule that says "The doors can be unlocked and open if the battery is dead" Full stop, no ifs, ands, or buts.
One of my unfavorite random car regulations is that as of some time in this millennium, cars sold in the USA may not have required lighting on movable bodywork.
This bans new cars from having clamshell bodywork like that found on classics like the Jaguar E-type and Ford GT40. I suspect it also results in many cars having narrower truck/hatch openings than they would have if they could put mandated lights on the trunk lid or rear hatch.
It's not hard to imagine the partially legitimate reason that on occasion, someone will drive with the trunk open, but do we really need a law about it?
> It's not hard to imagine the partially legitimate reason that on occasion, someone will drive with the trunk open
No, it's a much more serious and likely reason -- people stopping on a highway at night, getting out, and opening their trunk for some reason (like a spare tire, fluids, etc)?-- then their lights (and the reflectors in the lamp housings) are pointed at the sky.
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Your post reminded me of a video on the an imported TVR Tuscan, filmed by Doug DeMuro where he covers this too. The TVR Tuscan is one of those cars where if the rear trunk is open, you can’t see the turn signal lights. In the video it is claimed that because of that, by laws in the UK, the trunk must have a triangular exclamation point sign as a safety precaution to let other drivers know when the vehicle is immobile.
That is around the seven minute mark of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32u6KPTALxg
Every safety regulation is written in blood.
That particular blood was probably people stopped at night with the trunk open to access a spare tire or tools. And then there was more blood because sometimes those people forget to leave their lights on, or their lights don't function because the battery has died, so we got more regulation requiring ugly reflectors.
And so on.
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It is not the government's job to enumerate every specific brand of stupid design that may be harmful multiplied by every class of product nor should it be.
If you want to do that stuff, do it with a performance test or criteria, not with stupid whack-a-mole rules. And don't think that weasel wording the test to the same effect is any better. If you want to do this the not stupid way you need to actually do the hard work and figure out what the over-arching general case performance characteristics need to be.
With better styling cues and design that make it obvious how to use the Tesla handles (and all the degrees of copycats) it wouldn't be an issue. But that isn't the kind of sleek sext angular bullshit modern car designers like so it never got made and here we are.
Game it out - if you issue guidelines, people abuse them, then government agencies get in trouble (isn't it your job to stop this kind of thing?), so government agencies issue strict rules.
Bureaucracies have many fathers, the society we have is the result of conflict and incentives.
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>enumerate every specific brand of stupid design that may be harmful
As commonly said by the libertarian at heart, right up until the point their loved one gets injured or killed, then they are at the forefront of regulation.
> But that isn't the kind of sleek sext angular bullshit modern car designers like
Who likes safety and security? These features commonly make every day use more difficult. Who needs unblocked fire exits, that takes up too much room in the building. Who needs a common interface for a safety critical device, that removes the 'cool' factor.
I don't like electric windows, either. They like to fail in the rain, and are expensive to repair.
Manual windows roll up and down for decade after decade...
Electric door locks are bad, too. After a while, they won't lock or unlock.
I've owned dozens of vehicles and I've only had locks or windows fail on one of them -- and both failed on this vehicle: It was a Ford with manual locks and windows. Turns out if you design something poorly enough even mechanical parts can fail. Point being: quality of construction matters more to reliability than anything else.
I tend to keep cars for decades. My Ford for 35 years. The manual windows and doors never failed. My dodge is 50 years old. Doors and windows still work.
I've had three cars where the electric windows failed and two where the electric door locks failed.
What do you _do_ with your cars!?!
I use them as counterweights on my trebuchet. Doesn't everyone?