Comment on New Rules Could Force Tesla to Redesign Its Door Handles. That’s Harder Than It Sounds
artyom@piefed.social 1 week agoAnd you can absolutely do the same on the exterior: add a physical lock that interacts with the latch.
No, you can’t. Because, again, there is no method available to lock and unlock the door.
That’s basically how every other car work.
Again, that is not how this car works.
There’s no reason Tesla cars couldn’t satisfy that interaction.
I think you’ve lost the topic of this conversation. The topic is not that it’s impossible. It’s that it’s “harder than it sounds”.
We are going round and round here and I keep repeating myself over and over but I’m clearly not getting through to you so I’m gonna call it a day.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
But you haven’t described it. At least not in a way that proves that it would require a substantial change.
Here’s a video that talks about the manual latch release. Basically, each door has a cable that runs through the interior to manually release the door latch in case the battery fails or something. It bypasses the electronic-controlled locking system and goes straight to the latch.
I’m saying that adding a lock to the exterior wouldn’t require a massive design change, it just needs to interact with the existing cable mechanism (or add a separate cable) to release the latch.
That’s largely how other cars do it, except they have a physical lock there as well, which controls whether the exterior (or interior, depending on the child safety pin) handle connects to the latch. The difference w/ a Tesla is mostly that there is no physical lock, only an electronic lock, but the latch release system is similar enough that they could add it without massive changes to the rest of the door design. If they wanted to retrofit existing cars, they’d probably need to drill a hole to add the locking system, and then add a cable to the interior of the door. For future cars, they could change how the door handle is designed and probably leave the rest of the door design the same by adding some mechanical system and cable to the handle and nearby area of the door. I haven’t torn apart a Tesla door, but I highly doubt there’s anything special going on there (and I did see a teardown of a Cybertruck door and there was plenty of space to add mechanisms there).