It's a Norman door. A great example of form over function. Good designs are intuitive, but unfortunately, what makes for good test-drive marketing (look at the cool push-button!) doesn't necessarily make for good design. Yes, the manual lever 'checks the box' for concerns about a dead battery, but it is an unnecessary compromise of human-centered design.
The problem with the design isn’t the unintuitive handle. It’s the fact that said handle can damage the window if used. That is why it is an emergency-only handle. If anything, I wish the handle was less obvious so people wouldn’t accidentally use it. Even more ideally, I just with the handle didn’t have a somewhat decent chance of doing damage when used.
The person in this article didn't not escape his car because he was concerned about window damage. He didn't escape because his vehicle's hidden door controls unwittingly trained him into not fully understanding how the door latch works.
The problem is the psychological consequences of the design trapped the person inside, regardless of the emergency latch's existence. Most people presume that their car doors have one latch, especially if they only ever see or use a single one.
How can it be less obvious and still be legal? In my opinion it should be red with orange stripes and say "emergency door open" on it. It already has gotten people killed by how non-obvious it is.
The release could've been designed better by marking with an affordance, i.e., a symbol, that it opens the door AND it's only for emergencies.
Furthermore, they could've prevented its casual use when there is power by locking it with the force of a small electromagnet that fails open when power is lost OR with application of great force. A small solenoid and a piece of ferromagnetic metal might cost all of $0.10 USD more.
Even cheaper than a solenoid to prevent its use would be to simply write the software to drop the window when it is used, like other manufacturers with similar window designs have done with their mechanical door releases for decades... and like Tesla themselves does when you use the electronic button.
I don't see how I would known that if i didn't happen to have read it, it doesn't seem to be marked at all and it's as inconspicuous as possible. Not a desirable property in a safety feature.
This is speculation, but it seems like if this 12V battery fails closed, you could easily have a situation where the door won't open and the cabin is filling with smoke.
Is it reasonable to expect the owner of a Tesla Model Y to read the Model 3 manual to learn about manual door overrides? Doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
Iirc some of the vehicles in the Las Vegas tunnel are Model Ys. Hopefully they are the ones equipped with rear manual releases, because they're taking passengers in the back regularly and in the event of a fire the chips are already stacked against them.
In particular there is no manual door release for the backseat of a Model 3, and the Model Y manual door release is a cable hidden under a access door which is itself hidden under a mat in the rear door pocket [1] (assuming it has one, early model years do not).
A regular backseat passenger will never find the Model Y rear door manual release in the event of a crash without being shown exactly where it is. A regular backseat passenger in a Model 3 must either crawl into the front or break a window to escape.
I do believe the front door release is the same in all models though; which is a regular pull handle around where you would expect a normal door handle to be. Funnily enough, many people mistake it for the actual door release since the door UI is very unintuitive.
Edit: I know passenger, I just wanted to point out the absurdity of requiring intimate familiarity with a door to be able to open it, extending to drivers. Think car sharing pools etc, something the future will have more of.
Next up - in the next firmware update after fully self-driving, comes fully self-opening door!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things