Wait what, do Corvettes not just unlock and open when you pull the handle? Every vehicle I've ever owned, from the 80s to now, manual or electric lock, the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not. If this isn't the case, I'm almost inclined to consider that criminally negligent.
> the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not
The fact that the front doors both unlock when a single handle is pulled is because there's an electronic sensor and solenoid that unlocks everything when one handle is opened.
I had a Pontiac Vibe (really a Toyota Matrix) that had a cable in the door unlock assembly fail. You could open the door from the outside - the external door handle was physically the same part as the latch mechanism - but the external handle was back by your shoulder, while the internal handle was forward by the mirror and connected to the latch by a steel cable swaged to some aluminum pins; that connection eventually failed and the internal door handle flapped impotently.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time ignoring the problem and instead rolling down the window to open the door...
Regardless, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine that an automotive engineer might decide to replace cable actuator with a wire and solenoid.
> Regardless, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine that an automotive engineer might decide to replace cable actuator with a wire and solenoid.
Or with a bunch of CANBUS electromechanical hardware and some shittily written software running on the entertainment unit (with insecure cellular network connectivity).
I wonder how long before someone sets up unlockyourtoyota.ru where you can send them 0.01BTC to unlock the car you're stuck inside?
I think what GP might mean is that whether you are on the driver's or passenger's side, when you pull the handle that door opens even if it is locked.
I've noticed that on both our 1995 and 2014 Fords, when you pull the door handle it mechanically unlocks that door and opens it. (On the 2014 the other doors may additionally be triggered to unlock. However, in a no-power situation pulling the handle will still mechanically unlock just that one door.)
Chevy Express vans and trucks didn't unlock the door when you pulled the handle. You had to manually slide the unlock toggle or hit the electronic unlock button before opening the door.
I've only noticed this feature on Fords. My SAAB requires the occupant to pull up on the lock knob on the windowsill, and my Saturn requires one to turn the lock knob on the inside door handle to the unlocked position. While both require additional action besides just pulling the handle, neither relies on the car's electrical system to open or unlock the doors (and indeed, neither car has any electrical locking component in any of the doors).
He got the "electric roof" version, which had this awful hodgepodge for pneumatic rams, high pressure air hoses and couplings, and a seriously underpowered hydraulic pump - with instructions to fill the system with auto transmission fluid.
It was _not_ a well designed and reliable system, and some of the failure modes left the roof/door clamped down. He kept a pocket knife in th4e glovebox so you could stab the hoses to release the hydraulic fluid and manually push the roof open.
It wasn't until it failed closed while he was taking his girlfriend to the high school formal/dance, then ruined her dress by getting red auto trans fluid on it that he bit the bullet and threw all the supplied parts away and replaced it all with electric liner actuators...
For those who haven't clicked the link: The roof/doors are all one big assembly that hinges up and away, like Lambo doors for the entire top of the car.
My Nissan Versa has manual locks that do not unlock when the door handle is pulled from the inside, to include front doors (not a child safety lever issue). Granted, they’re manual so it’s easy to just unlock but from a human factors perspective I can see people panicking and just yanking on the door handle in a critical emergency like a fire.
I’ve always considered this a serious safety design flaw.
That's how pretty much all car doors worked for decades. As a kid I used to lock the back doors when riding around and pull the handle [0]. No, the child safety locks were not enabled.
I’m not sure this is a given. My previous Ford would unlock the front door when the indoor handle was pulled, regardless of lock state. It seems like it’s depends on manufacturer, model, and options package.
> the front doors both open when the handle is pulled, locked or not
Unfortunately, this is not anymore warranted. Already in models of ten years ago, there do exist "full lock non mechanically overridable" and "lock which is unlocked through the handles". Disabling the "feature" requires intervention from the manufacturer - if it can be disabled at all.
Look, I am informed that in at least many of the current cars with RFID based keys, it is impossible to lock yourself in the car... (And the idea seems to have spawned from manufacturers coming from the territories in the world most notorious for carjacking.)
That hasn't always been the case. For example, our 1991 Saturn station wagon (with mechanical locks) would only open if you unlocked the door first with the lock lever.
> Police believe that when James Rogers got into the vehicle, a cable became loose and cut off the power to the operate the horn and locks. Rogers did not know how to manually unlock the vehicle and became trapped inside
> the 2007 Corvette has a manual release located on the floorboard by the driver's seat
Having random cables cut doesn't help the situation, but the issue was not knowing how to manually release the latch and not having an emergency window breaker.
Design matters, and bad designs can literally be deadly. Why auto mfgs feel the need to "innovate" with shifter designs is beyond me. The worst part is how every mfg seems to be implementing a different design of bad electronic shifters, from wheels and touchscreens to one-click-at-a-time joysticks to single-function pushbuttons for some gears with others on a scroll wheel. They've taken something and made it worse with no benefit to the user. At least with those auto-flushing toilets, the intention was good, even if the implementation is still somehow so awful decades later.
I drove a rental with a rotary-dial shifter. That is the single most braindead UX thing I've seen in a car that doesn't involve a touch-screen. We've had PRND(L) levers as the standard for shifting in automatics for over 50 years now, and the dial offers no advantages that I can see.
Probably it is a few dolars cheaper. Not enough to change the bottom line, but as always, any short term cost cutting is enough to give brain-dead Harvard MBAs multiple orgasms.
Dollars? I've worked with car manufacturers and they would sell their soul to save pennies. OTOH they tend to be very conservative with anything that actually impacts the driving part of the car.
My Ford Fusion has one of those rotary dials. Didn't like it at first, but it is nice having that air space free (not able to accidentally knock it out of gear, more room for an extra cup holder). Also the cars with a physical gear shift lever still work by activating switches, there hasn't been mechanical linkage for years in a lot of models.
>> We've had PRND(L) levers as the standard for shifting in automatics for over 50 years now, and the dial offers no advantages that I can see.
My guess is that the dial costs less, so it is done for the company not the customer. Many cases of bad design come from prioritizing the manufacturer over the customer.
I rented a Ford Edge two months ago that had one. It was quite distracting. At the end of a week, I still hadn't internalized how it worked. I had to think about it every time.
On my old Chevrolet Tahoe, I can tell what gear I just shifted into by feel (shifting into D, it has a slight tendency to overshoot the normal overdrive mode and end up locked into 3rd). And of course, this is essentially a nonissue on manual transmissions.
Most cars have a stop at D; e.g. for the ones where you pull the stem towards to to leave park, you can let the stem spring back at neutral and push it down until it stops at D, and for the ones with a button you can release the button at neutral.
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Honestly if the rotary dial had similar tactile feedback, it would probably be fine. No worse than when they moved it off of the tree as bench seats were retired for safety reasons.
It's not just auto manufacturers. It seems literally everything is being designed with a philosophy of "fuck the user" in mind. I cannot think of a single thing more complicated than a concrete block that functions better now than previous versions did 10 years ago, and I'm sure there are some things that work at least as good, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
>> I cannot think of a single thing more complicated than a concrete block that functions better now than previous versions did 10 years ago...
I've got news for you. My uncle worked in construction most his life. He told me the concrete isn't as good today as it used to be. He said in some places for shipping they "blow it around". Meaning you don't put it on a ship using a conveyor, you do something similar to blowing dust through a pipe? I never asked for more detail. He thought the handling was exposing it to humidity or in some way degrading the concrete. This would be another case of prioritizing cost/efficiency over the customer.
So even your humble concrete block might not be as good as they used to make em'
Quite a lot of electronics test & measurement equipment. Notably modern spectrum analyzers & network analyzers. Also modern arbitrary waveform generators & RF generators are vastly better than a decade ago. Other bits haven't improved nearly as much, eg the HP 3458A is still one of the best meters in the world. The Fluke 5720A Calibrator is likewise an old workhorse.
I forgot about engineering hardware. I've used some of that stuff, lots of it is good but tons of it is vendor lock in stuff as well, NI comes to mind.
My building had a dialing system replaced with one that uses a phone line to call a mobile of each resident. It can also only assing one number. Now I get the call at work if my wife orders pizza, or if i am out of the country.
It also doesnt work at all if i am in tube, or when my building forgets to pay phone bill, or movike network craps out
I'm glad to say I don't have any shit like this that I have to deal with. I've got a phone and a laptop and that's it. My car basically has a fuel controller and ABS controller in it. Aftermarket MP3 playing head unit with an aux jack.
Whatever benefits the tech firms and salespeople sold you (not literally you, anyone reading) on all this shit, if you have this stuff in your life I guarantee you your life is more stressful than mine because of it.
I'm to the point where I only buy used stuff period. Basically food and underwear have to be new. I don't think I've bought a brand new anything in over 5 years. I don't know if I ever will if this trend continues, proprietary single serve coffee pouches, internet connected stovetops, TVs that show ads separate from the broadcast, cars that track your movements and sell them to data brokers, touch screen everything, how many screens does a single person need?
But in ten years, all the used stuff will also be fully-electronic vendor-locked garbage, just older and with the cloud services down, and hence unusable.
I think it's more like as things get more complex, there are many more edge cases to check and most are very unlikely to happen statistically/practically so manufacturers don't put enough thinkin/design effort in those "details".
They're literally engineering shit people don't need now. In virtually every product. And doing UI redesigns on things that change the user friendly UX, often breaking it.
I remember looking forward to browser updates, OS updates, the next generation hardware whatever. Things used to actually get better. I actually got a new phone the other day with a newer android version, never mind that there's a fucking hole in the screen, when I changed my screen brightness there was a deliberate animated delay to the brightness changing with the slider. Seriously, who the fuck is making decisions like this?
90% of things don't need to get more complex. A touch screen on a fridge, speakers in your car that get louder as you accelerate, Bluetooth speakers that need software updates, these are not improvements to the products in any real way whatsoever.
Exactly. Couldn't they just have some system where the door handles have a magnetic dead-switch, that reverts to manual operation when no power is applied?
But the handle DOES open the door. It’s just at your feet, quite clearly marked, instead of physically on the door. It’s specifically there so that if you are in an accident you can still release the door. It’s designed With the idea the car will see a road course and is far superior to a handle on the door.
It’s sad he died but I found that handle in the first 5 minutes of owning my first corvette. It has a giant red picture of the door opening.
Hidden? It’s directly below where the “oh shit” handle is on the door, you need to move your hand less than 6” to pull it. Calling it hidden is completely misrepresenting reality. If my 7 year old knows where it is and insists on using it to open the door, I hope your 11 year old can figure it out.
From [1], I see it's a discreet, black lever with a small picture of a door opening. It perhaps is about 6" away, but in a space almost always obscured by ones legs.
Emergency controls in vehicles with proper regulation look like this [2], so they can still be used in the dark, with smoke, etc.
Humans expect tools to be at arm height. Do not work against natural assumptions. If you increase cognitive load, that's that much more attention diverted in a state where attention is already maxed out or otherwise in shortage.
The elements you're referring to are procedural mitigations to a poor design from a human factors standpoint. Those mitigations are always less preferred than managing those risks from an engineering perspective.
OSHA actually outlines the preference:
1) Eliminate the hazard outright (not possible here, you need the door to lock sometimes)
2) Engineer out the risk (they tried to do...poorly...with the manual unlock)
"manual release located on the floorboard by the driver's seat"
I am willing to bet my house that half the people who built that car would not find the lever if it suddenly caught fire (or any other emergency) while they are in it
> Having random cables cut doesn't help the situation, but the issue was not knowing how to manually release the latch and not having an emergency window breaker.
>> Having random cables cut doesn't help the situation
It was the battery cable or similar, which cut power to all the electronic means of getting out - including the other door. It was not "cut" in the sense of someone using a knife, it just came loose or similarly broke contact. This is a design failure, not a RTFM failure.
>> Wait what, do Corvettes not just unlock and open when you pull the handle?
Nope, not that model.
I had the chance to take one of the Fisker Karma development vehicles home from work. Everyone said it drove great. I got in and realized the door latch was a button. The whole car way prototype and development parts. The window was kinda small to crawl through. I said no thanks. There was a loop of string in the bottom of the door pocket to manually open it. Still nope.
In my 2021 Honda CR-V this is a configurable option - you can decide which behavior you want.
For example, you don't want your kids to open the doors while you're driving. Or you don't want a car-jacker to reach through the window and open your door.
Electronically, through the settings in the touchscreen panel on the dash. These are not child locks, but rather set the behavior of the door latch when the door is locked.
Does it have a fail-safe configuration if electricity is lost like in the examples above? If not, the ability to change configuration may not actually mitigate the failure mode
Yes, there is a manual door lock button-thing on the door next to the door latch. Though honestly I don't know if that works when the power is dead. As cars move to "fly by wire" this becomes a larger concern - less mechanical linkages, more buttons/switches + wires.
For example to open the back you push a button on tailgate and then pull to open. That button is definitely not a mechanical latch, so if the battery is dead then you're not opening the tailgate.
This would be an interesting experience - go to an auto dealer and ask them to disconnect the battery, then see what still functions.
Anything that's mechanically supposed to happen is irrelevant after the mechanism, with 2 tons of metal behind it moving at high speed, slams into something significantly more substantial than the thin layer of decorative sheet metal protecting it. You can not design things to be invincible, no matter how robust something is, with sufficient force applied in a certain way, it will fail. It's honestly an engineering marvel that people consistently are able to get out of their cars after an accident.
I'm talking more generally about cars not always unlocking after an accident.
In this specific scenario, you still have a component failure. Something that was supposed to be connected wasn't. It would be nice if they designed a better fail safe but it's not a case of "corvette handles aren't designed to unlock."
It's not about locked or unlocked. Pulling the handle is supposed to open the door. Locking prevents that. In this case, the handle doesn't mechanically unlatch the door, it does so electronically. With no power it is not possible for it to unlatch. Since locking is then a software feature, we might say those doors are locked by default and require software and electronics to make them open. Because of that there is a mechanical thing you can pull, but nobody knows where that is or that it exists unless they are told.
On most(all?) Modern cars you can't unlock the door from the inside if the door got locked from the outside. I think it was made law to work like this? In order to prevent thefts where someone just runs a tiny rod through an opening and pulls a handle - that doesn't work anymore. If you get locked in the car while inside there is no way to open the door, you'd have to break a window to get out.
> On most(all?) Modern cars you can't unlock the door from the inside if the door got locked from the outside.
Teslas have an (emergency?) mechanical release on their doors. At least the Model 3 does. Given that you can't 'lock from the outside' in the ordinary sense, if this law exists, there must be some leeway.
Ironically enough, Tesla Model 3 emergency mechanical release on doors is positioned so technically “well”, passengers not familiar with how the door opens in a standard way from the inside (by pressing a glowing button on the door) tend to pull on the emergency release first (which is located on the door right next to the standard release button).
Happened to my friends at least a couple of times when giving them a ride. Imo, not a bad situation, because the worst case scenario here is that they will accidentally use an emergency release instead of the standard one on their first try, which will only trigger tesla to make a warning sound that the emergency release was used. Definitely works out better in a real emergency situation too, compared to cars with difficult to find emergency release handles, given people not familiar with Tesla doors tend to reach for the emergency handles in those by default at times.
From this video, I learned that it's quite hard to find, and if you're in the back seat, there's no emergency mechanism at all. https://youtu.be/QCIo8e12sBM?t=239
