“Arizona toddler rescued after getting trapped in a Tesla with a dead battery”
PATHETIC. You have a 1000 POUND plus battery and cannot even keep enough charge in it to open a car door.
The system never warned the grandmother that the auxiliary battery was dying (if she even understood the consequences of that).
There's no transfer of the charge from the main batteries to the 12v auxiliary battery in case of an emergency.
There's no way to manually unlock the doors from the outside in case of an emergency.
That toddler would have been in real trouble in an isolate area where there was no one to respond fast enough to break the glass in 100 degree weather - all because these ignorant engineers (and the ignorant quality control team members) have no understanding of the history of safety devices in cars and that the drive to make everything a gadget puts people at risk.
While normally ascribed to aviation safety, a Tombstone Mentality is "a pervasive attitude of ignoring design defects until people have died because of them" and any engineer who paid attention in a real education program would have learned about it. More and more engineers are restarting their understanding of automobile safety in the early 1900s and learning as they go, at the expense of their victims.
It’s the 12-volt battery that lost its charge. Without it, can’t start the car. My daughter ran into this with her hybrid car when the 12-volt battery died after sitting in it for a long time with the stereo on.
On the Tesla, you can remove a cover on the bumper, and activate the door opener with a small battery. But who reads the manual before driving a car (I don’t read it all). On my non-Tesla EV, the big battery pack always re-charges the 12-volt battery. You should get a warning if the battery is getting old and too weak to hold a charge; if not, then poor design.
It’s a good thing Musk is a genius, because otherwise, this would be stupid. Oh, wait (manual override? Hello? Engineering 101?).
When the low-voltage battery approaches the end of its lifecycle, the car is expected to warn drivers to schedule a service center appointment. Sometimes, the battery just dies without warning. When this happens, the vehicle's auxiliary systems remain without power, even though the high-voltage battery has enough charge.
It's a stupid design. Failing to read the article is even stupider.