Wait, I might know the answer. Is it because they don't use LIDAR and they're made by a company headed by some piece of shit who likes to cut costs? Haha, I was just guessing, but ok.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
620 points (96.5% liked)
Technology
72440 readers
2522 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Maybe take the baby out so it slows down?
Tesla tried to do it all at once instead of perfecting the electric tech first and then incrementally adding on advances. They also made change for change’s sake. There’s absolutely no reason mechanical door locks could not have been engineered to work on this car as the default method of opening and closing the door. It’s killing people.
There's absolutely a reason to not engineer something you're not required to. It's called capitalism. Tesla cut every corner they could.
No, the problem is they engineered something they didn't need to, because Musk thinks everything should be electric because it's cool. They had to then engineer a mechanical release, because it was required by law (for good reason)
Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper. The fly by wire in the cyber truck is far more expensive, heavier, and far more dangerous than the very well polished power steering systems every other car uses
Maybe it's something like they wanted to make more money on repairs or something... But even that they could've done better by starting from very common, cheap technology
Let's be clear... The real problem here is that Elon Musk, opinion having idiot that he is, made decisions from on high with very little understanding of engineering
Musk thinks everything should be electric because it's cool.
I strongly disagree. Things are getting more and more electric across all manufacturing because it is cheap. A single touch screen that drops in place under a snap on bezel with a premade cable harness and some programming time is so much faster and cheaper than designing, installing, wiring, coding, and testing physical buttons or mechanical linkages. PCBs can be tested in a negligible amount of time.
Mechanical door locks would have been cheaper.
No. Sorry, but no. The locks were going to be electrically operated no matter what. But the inclusion of standard mechanical components would increase the cost significantly.
very common, cheap technology
Yes, but that would be electrical components. It's not very intuitive, I agree. But cost is the sole reason things are becoming more "electronic". Electronics are extremely cheap compared to their analog ancestors. And not only that, but since very few mfrs are using off the shelf mechanical components, they are now less supplied and harder to get. So their cost is going up. Electronics are going down.
I don't know the engineering endeavors that he may or may not have been directly involved with. I'm not entirely sure what "from on high" means, but I would presume you are referring to his net value and authority. In that case, I would say he is no different than literally any other CEO. He made decisions that made him a profit. That's what they do. GE is a great test case for this. Nearly destroyed the company in the long term so that board members see a small financial gain in the short term, then dump the carcass on the next guy. It's just money. That's all.
Yes, electronics are very cheap... But remember the part where they also have a mechanical mechanism? They have two systems, where most cars have this very simple lock that connects to a tiny motor assembly. It's literally a piece of plastic and a few wires
The tablet thing is true, they've changed cars to computerize everything, and once you've done that you can connect everything over a network. Every button needs to do back to a chip to become a digital signal, so before you had these complex one-off wiring harnesses for everything
But the tablet thing is again, common. It makes sense, it's just worse
But Elon is a unique case. Elon likes to actually make decisions, because he thinks he's Tony Stark. He actually goes down into teams and hangs out, and they have to just work around whatever decisions he makes. It's present in all of his companies, but you can see it most in Twitter, because they didn't have time to build a team to strategically distract him when he comes to visit
This absolute idiot has spent the last month trying to get grok to be a literal Nazi. First, he added a bunch of white genocide to the prompt, making it change the topic to that from any question for a few days.
Now it's responding all confused, and saying things like "I never gave Jeffrey Epstein tours of spaceX or Tesla" when asked it Elon did it. Seems to me they fed Elon's tweets in the RAG system in a amateur way
He micromanages and meddles constantly... That's what he does at his companies
For a counterexample, Jeff Bezos. He was heavily involved in the fire phone, and had some genuinely cool ideas... But the priorities were all wrong, so it flopped. He learned his lesson
Elon : some of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Luigi: lol same
By your logic then, capitalism is great, because that means no one would've engineered these crazy locks but instead just used the tried and true ones.
Wait. That's not what happened?
Oh.
engineered these crazy locks
I would joke that since they don't work then I doubt any engineering went into them at all. But I know that isn't true.
So I wonder if you could elaborate on what you mean by "crazy locks"? I did a lot of work investigating the manufacturing equipment and their use, so I remember a bit about their components, design, and assembly; but I did not work with those directly so I could be missing something entirely. I don't remember there being anything groundbreaking about the mechanics of the door locks. But the general build always felt... "thinner". Most manufacturers stay away from minimum standards by at least the standard deviation or two, so if the required gauge was 18 ± 1, a typical mfr would use 20+. Tesla would use 18. On the nose. That was a lot more common in automotive but even hyundai/kia used wide margins for safety. All that to say, I have a hard time believing the door locks were so complex that a sizable investment would be anything other than reinventing the wheel, but even moreso that it was even worth the superfluous cost.
One of the last jobs I had there was a machine that they picked up third hand and cobbled together with some very sketchy safety systems that wildly failed requirements. I was there for days and it was one of the more extensive reports I've ever made on a single installation. The control system was designed by the onsite engineers and passed flawlessly. But they had a lot to do to get the equipment usable.
I stopped reading when you suggested 20 gauge was heavier than 18 gauge.
Rookie mistake you can't come back from.
Lol, I saw that after I sent it, but was absolutely not confident enough to change it. I don't work in that field any more so that is not the only thing about materials that you probably know better than me. And I'm sorry for the wall of text. My bad.
Also, the fact that they removed Lidar sensors and just base their self driving on cameras is plainly stupid.
Technical debt.
If you promise self driving on all cars, but cars already on the road don't have lidar then no car has lidar.
That's not really the case, as Elon's already admitted that there are at least about a half a million Teslas with old HW3 self driving computers that need to have them upgraded to HW4 for them to have the chance at eventually get the FSD the buyers were promised. That's not even mentioning the upgraded cameras the HW4 vehicles have gotten. The reason for Musk not wanting lidar on Teslas is very simple: cost. He thinks it's too expensive and unnecessary, unlike every single other manufacturer working on the same problem.
Upgrading a computer is very different to adding a new sensor array all around the body.
I'm not saying upgrading older cars the only reason for excluding lidar, but I bet it was a large factor.
load more comments
(8 replies)
In this crash, part of the blame was on retracting handles on the outside, not the interior locks. If the handle is retracted, it’s tough to open the door from the outside.
- model s has electrically presented handles. The car has to be somewhat functional for the handles to extend …. I haven’t heard of extend on emergency or extend on power lost, or any other failsafe
- model 3/y door handles are not electrical. You have to press on one end to extend the other. You may or may not like them, but at least they don’t have that failure case of what happens when the car loses power
Just FYI all the Tesla cars to my knowledge need power for the doors to open because the handles aren’t physically attached to the door mechanism. They’re all electronic. If you own one of these cars I highly advise you to read the manual and find out where the mechanical door releases are(they’re somewhat hidden).
Another fun fact and this isn’t exclusive to Tesla. If you pay attention when you open the door the window retracts a tiny bit to clear the weatherstripping. If you have no power that can’t happened. What is unique to Tesla as far as I can tell is that their weatherstripping isn’t as large/pliable as other manufacturers or maybe it’s just the assembly. Using the mechanical release with power still retracts the window. In the event the battery is dead or damaged from an accident using the mechanical release requires breaking the window. That means the door is significantly more difficult to open.
No. Window retracting on door opening is no different than other cars with frameless windows. Most lowering the window may damage the weatherstripping but is no impediment to door opening.
True that the door latch itself is just a solenoid. I actually forgot the the outside handles don’t do anything but give you something to pull on.
The worst part of the manual door release is that it’s different on each model. For mine, the front door manual release is easily accessible to the point I have to tell people not to use it. Back door is a problem though
I mentioned the retracting window isn’t exclusive to Tesla. The issue is with how they work when they no longer retract and that appears to be a Tesla problem. It’s not an issue if the window has power.
Tesla forum No power, broken window.
Random article where parts of the car had power and others didn’t. Broken window as result.
Another article about broken windows using the mechanical release with lack of power.
You can choose not to drive bleeding edge technology, but sadly you have no choice in whether to share the road with it.
its on you if you bought a tesla after the twitter purchase, cant have buyers remorse.
Seems like a lot of this technology is very untested and there are too many variables to make it where it should not be out on the roads.
Move fast and break things, but it's a passenger vehicle on a public road.
It's been a nightmare seeing tech companies move into the utility space and act like they're the smartest people in the room and the experts that have been doing it for 100 years are morons. Move fast and break things isn't viable when you're operating power infrastructure either. There's a reason why designs require the seal of a licensed engineer before they can be constructed. Applying a software development mentality to any kind of engineering is asking for fatalities
Article does not actually answer why Tesla vehicles crash as much as they do or how their crash frequency compares to other vehicles. Its more about how scummy tesla is as a company and how it witholds data from the public when it could incriminate them.
just scanning the article, it seems to sum it up as - No one knows why yet, not even Tesla '
With a dash of - Tesla might know and be withholding information
It's much more likely that they don't know. Look at the DOGE staffers hand picked by musk, they are completely incompetent but hyper confident. If they're indicative of the software engineers working at Tesla, then they most likely assumed their code was perfect. Keep in mind it's all running on LLM code now.
Yeah, it’s because they didn’t put a lidar on their fucking cars because they’re cheap, It’s not a mystery, why don’t you know this?
load more comments
(2 replies)
This is the kind of shit that makes me worried even seeing someone else driving one of these deathtraps near me while I am driving. They could explode or decide to turn into me on the highway or something. I think I about this more than Final Destination when seeing a logging truck these days.
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›