One of the best perks of this job, other than getting to work with people I love, is getting to drive a lot of different cars. These are mostly new review units, or press cars, though I’m also invited to drive a decent number of random used cars as well. Every time I get into any car I’m unfamiliar with, the first thing I try to do is figure out how to get out of it in an emergency.
This isn’t just important for me, it’s vital for pretty much everyone. You may not review cars, but if you take any form of taxi or rideshare service, you face the risk of being trapped in a car unnecessarily.
In the old era of cars, nearly every vehicle had a straightforward mechanical door handle that provided a physical connection between your hand and the door release. Power-operated locks are nearly universal, but power-operated door handles were much less common until recently. Why? Electric cars with retracting, flush door handles and frameless windows in cars.
A Real Fatal Risk
I was reminded of this a couple of times in the last week, once because of comedy and once because of tragedy. The funny version of this was when Parker and I got into a Fiat Topolino at the New York Auto Show and both shut our doors for some reason. There was very little risk to our safety inside the air-conditioned Javits Convention Center, but it was slightly uncomfortable that there was no obvious way to get out and no door handle. 
This is because of thrift, not style or technology. The locking mechanism on the little Fiat is mechanical, but to keep the car cheap and light, there’s no handle. Instead, you have to pull on a fabric loop. On the driver’s side, this loop is somewhat obscured by the steering wheel and dash. For further cost savings, the doors are identical, which means the strap is behind the passenger, so I didn’t even see it until Parker found it on his side.
Again, the risks were low here. We were not in peril. Had we been driving the car and had a fire, however, it could have been an issue.
This seems to have happened recently in China with the crash of a Xiaomi Su7 electric sedan. The car, with three college students inside, was driving in Anhui Province when it crashed and caught fire. Reportedly, the car burst into flames, and there were allegations that the women were not able to escape. According to Car News China, the Su7 has electronic doors with a specific kind of emergency release:
Addressing claims about door functionality, Xiaomi representatives clarified to China News Weekly that all four doors are equipped with mechanical emergency release handles located in the storage compartment area of each door panel. These handles function mechanically and can open the doors even if the battery is damaged.
Mechanical door releases in the storage pockets of cars are not uncommon, but I don’t think in an emergency, it’s going to be the first place anyone looks. The issue with powered handles is that if the car loses power, the passengers lose the ability to open the door if they don’t know about the backup. This came up last year with Jason’s neighbor, who ended up breaking her window when the car lost power.
As you can see above, the front doors in the Model Y can be opened with a release ahead of the window switches. In the rear, like the SU7, the release is in the door pocket. Here’s a video showing how the rear one works:
You have to remove a mat, then a panel, and then pull on the lever. Again, that’s a lot to ask for in an emergency.
This isn’t just limited to fancy electric cars. Any car with “frameless” windows that have a window that goes into the roof, as opposed to having a full frame, will have electronic door handles so the car can lower the window without cracking the glass.
Even older cars, like the C6 Corvette, might have a power-operated door opening mechanism. A few years ago, a 72-year-old veteran and his dog became trapped in the man’s Corvette after a battery cable came loose, and both died in a restaurant parking lot from heat exposure. Our own Griffin Riley has a C6 Corvette and grabbed me a picture of the release mechanism, which is in the footwell:
This is a prominent feature if you know what to look for, otherwise, it sort of blends into the floor.
What You Can Do About It
Whenever I’m in a new-to-me car, I look to see what the lock/door handle situation is immediately. I just try to make it a part of my routine when getting into a new car, the full version of which I do when driving:
- Check to confirm if there are regular doors.
- If the door handles are powered, locate the emergency release for front and rear passengers (then tell my daughter).
- Check my seat, and make sure that when my hands are laid across the steering wheel, the top of the wheel comes to my wrists.
- Check mirrors.
- Check to see where the emergency flashers are.
- Check to see where I can ditch a wrapper full of chewed gum.
If you’re not driving new cars regularly, it’s still good to check when you get into the back of an Uber what the situation is. For many cars, including the Cadillac Lyriq I just reviewed, it’s as straightforward as pulling on the handle twice. The same actually works in my old BMW 5-Series when the door is locked. This is an easy thing to quickly test when you get in a car.
If you’re in something unfamiliar and you’re a passenger, you can always ask the driver (if they know) or quickly search online to see how to self-extract from that particular vehicle. In my experience, rideshares are more likely to be EVs and therefore more likely to have unexpected doors.
This is also important for children! Whether it’s a press car or a rental, I like to ask my daughter how she would get out of the vehicle in an emergency.
I will admit that it’s not an easy muscle to build up if you’re not a reviewer, frequent traveler, or regular user of taxis or ridesharing. It’s worth trying to learn and, especially if you have teens who are constantly getting in random cars all the time, worth reminding your family.
Top graphic images: Hyundai; The Autopian
Don’t get me started on parking brakes. My WRX may be a turd in some circles, but I have a mechanical lever that can stop the car if the brakes somehow aren’t doing the job.
∑which HAS happened to me in another car, so I made sure this had one too.
In 60 years of transport on this earth I have never given this a thought. Tomorrow I am going to learn how on my regular driver. FYI it is easier to push the windshield out of its place than break a side window.
This is why I subscribe to GMTFOofHERE. Yeah, it’s a bit steep at $15 a month, but the app gets me out of most modern cars.
As someone who travels frequently for work, it astounds me how many of my compatriots just get into a rental car and drive off. Safety be damned, they’re going to cut across 4 lanes of traffic with their headlights off because they have no idea where they’re going.
On average, it takes me about 10 minutes to change my mirrors, adjust the seat, adjust the steering wheel, figure out the headlights, connect my phone, etc. but it’s well worth it.
The dude and his ShihTsu that passed in their C6 was in the town I grew up in, the whole situation is senseless.
What’s most frustrating about this is that we already have a solution to this problem, mechanical door handles exist, and there’s no damn reason to hide them.
And the frameless window thing is not a good reason. I have an E36 coupe with frameless windows and a mechanical handle. It works fine. It just has a sensor in the door latch that tells the window to roll down when it moves slightly.
I think my F56 Mini is the same way. I wonder if they’ve transitioned away from it on newer models?
This ^^^ !!!!
This is what I’ve never understood about these electronic doors. Just use the mechanical release and put a sensor in the handle so as soon as someone starts to pull the handle it lowers the window. Why does it need to be any more complicated than that?
I hate electrical door releases so much. Just use a handle. I don’t have to wait a frustrating little second for a door handle to release the latch. Use a handle! This isn’t hard.
This is also a big problem with EVs making it easier and harder because hey look how cool it is.
THIS is why I always carry a small shaped charge in my backpack. Just slap it on a door, flick a switch and ten seconds later, blammo, I’m out.
I prefer to believe I live in the version of reality where you mean this literally.
I may join you. Where should I go to pick one up, C4all.com?
Outside the back gate of just about any Army or Marine installation on a Friday night.
Get on the SecDef’s Signal chat (if you have the app you might already be) or email him at whiskeypete @ smirnoff . vodka . ru. Hurry, he might be getting thrown under the bus soon
I wouldn’t trust myself not to do something totally stupid with that.
It looks like a stick of gum, right? “Red light! Green light!!”
Hasta lasagna, don’t get any on ya.
I’m glad you published this, thanks, although I’m genuinely terrified at how likely it’s been that I could have been trapped and died more than a few times as a rider.
Well, that’s a fairly disconcerting topshot, tyvm.
quality nightmare fuel
Humans have trouble reliably hitting the brake during the course of normal driving.
When the car is on fire and they in full on panic mode, they aren’t going to be able to remove a mat, a panel and then pull a cable.
The door release for every car should be a mechanical-ish handle. It is ok if a normal pull just triggers an electric release. But a panicked hard pull should trigger the manual release.
In terms of asking the kid how they’d get out… do cars still have the child lock thingy for the rear?
Maybe the vehicles I’ve been in are unrepresentative, but I never understood what was meant by this.
Every car I’ve been in (admittedly all mechanical examples), the rear door locks can be actuated by hand. So a simple handle pull doesn’t open the doors if they’re locked, but it just takes one extra motion to unlock them and it’s easy to distinguish.
Of course, yeah, doesn’t help when getting to electric handles and hidden mechanical things.
The child lock disables the (usually rear) doors from being opened from inside irrespective of lock status. There’s no pulling twice or unlocking the door; the egress mode of the door handle is disabled, like being in back of a cop car.
Holy shit. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anything like that.
I’m willing to bet that if you’ve ridden in or owned a sedan, crossover, or five door hatchback you’ve encountered it. The lever is usually hidden on the door panel so it’s only accessible with the door open.
that said I don’t know anyone who’s actually used this feature. My dad would put tape over the lever to keep us dirty rotten kids from messing with it.
Many recent cars require the key to enable/disable the child safety lock. This is great as it pretty much eliminates unintentional activation or deactivation.
I’ve know plenty of people that enable it. If you have a child or teen with developmental disabilities, intense impulse control, it is very helpful to control when they can open the door.
After getting annoyed by careless backseat passengers smacking my doors into things, and in one case dooring a cyclist, I leave the child locks on all the time. You need me to let you out.
Never encountered it in your description however did encounter it in a cop car. Or two. Just saying.
We used it when the kids got to the point where they could unbuckle themselves from their booster seats. More to prevent accidental door dings than for personal safety reasons, but every now and again it probably saved somebody from getting smacked with a door when walking next to our car in a parking lot.
The kids got even with me when they were teens. One would volunteer to drive, the other would yell “Shotgun!” and I’d get relegated to the back seat, where the sneaky little $#!^s had already set the trap.
Love those kids. I raised them well.
They shaped many door locks so you can’t grip them when locked.
You say this, but across the board when doing reviews of new cars, but it’s rare for authors on this site mention whether a new car has mechanical door handles or not when doing a review of a new car.
Please use your power as an Autopian author to make adding one extra sentence to new car reviews at the Autopian stating whether a car has mechanical door handles or not THE STANDARD at The Autopian.
It’s a fair point. I think when a car has non-mechanical ones, it should be talked about, for sure. I probably don’t do that every time.
I’ve never heard of a person refusing to buy a car because it has mechanical door handles, but I’ve heard too many times to count people refusing to buy a car because it has electric door handles.
I personally didn’t buy a new Fiat 500e due to the electric external door handles, and instead got my 25 Leaf S, even though I never use the rear seats in my Leaf, and I’d be better off with a shorter wheelbase car for ease of parking, the better turning circle, and less interior space to heat up in the winter/cool in the summer.
They saved probably less than $100 for both doors per car by going with the electric external door handles, but lost thousands of dollars per car from the lost sales. Hell, inside there is a mechanical door latch backup, why they couldn’t have just made it beefy enough to withstand constant use, put on external door handles that utilize the same mechanism, and just not have electric door latches in the first place is beyond me.
This is almost like the reviews that mention cars not having spare tires. Really meaningful to some buyers. Others, totally clueless.
I think there should be some sort of annoyance rating system. Points get deducted for stupid design decisions. Extra points deducted for stupid hidden or counterproductive controls. On a scale of 1-100, I bet plenty of new cars would barely be left with 10 points.
Personally I’ve dealt with way more dead batteries than I have tire blowouts (a total of 0 Blowouts), and if a kid/kids and or dog/dogs were locked in my car on a hot day when the 12v died in a regular car I’d just unlock the door with the key and open it, in a ton of electric cars you need either a jump or to break a window, and how many of us keep a portable jump starter on our person? If anything it would be in the locked car that you need it to unlock.
And before anybody gets on me for locking living beings in what amounts to a mobile oven, I only do so for less than 10 minute stops and I open the windows about 1/3rd of the way, and when I do it’s not over 80°F anyhow.
Is there a universal check list for items to cover in an automotive review? There should be. I once read a review about the Isuzu Vehicross where the author mentioned how the rear hatch handle was used to open it and dinged the car for not having a handle to open it.
Frameless door glass worked fine on cars with mechanical door latches and often without power windows – first generation Neon, about 20 years of Subarus, all those classic Detroit hardtops. What’s the secret to that lost technology?
I suspect it’s lower standards on the part of both manufacturers and customers but I want it to be some secret formula lost in the mid 2000s.
I think its just better sealing- the glass popping up into a channel vs just resting against a seal.
There’s nothing stopping them from building a mechanical mechanism that allows the glass to drop. Hell, make the door pull like a 2 stage trigger, pull it back X amount and the window drops, pull it further and the door unlatches. TADA!
Bad idea you know someone is going to accidentally pull it. Then you have issues and costs getting it back to normal. Just put the kids in a safety seat and allow pulling the handle to over ride the lock.
I’m talking about the fraction of an inch it drops on current offerings like the M3…
Well a mechanical mechanism to drop the window when opening the door wouldn’t be very simple. However that doesn’t mean you can’t have a mechanical door handle with a sensor to do the window drop like my car from the 2000’s and my MIL’s old PT Cruiser convertible. You can’t rush it, but you can open the door w/o the window down as I had to do recently when the battery died in my car.
I disagree. Simple is relative to everything else that has to be done to make a new car. That mechanism would be very simple.
That being said frameless windows are worse.
Sure it would be simple compared to an umpteen speed AT or a turbo charged DOHC whatever, but far more complex than a switch sending a signal to the module that controls the window.
I have this on a few older cars. The secret is a small switch that gets activated when you pull the handle. The door is still mechanical, the switch just activates the window. So you don’t need an electric door opener just because you have frameless windows.
My ’78 Cougar has frameless door glass and manual windows. There is no window retraction when I pull the door handle – the glass is just held against the door gasket by the simple expedient of the door being closed.
That said, ‘modern’ (newer than the 80’s, let’s say) cars with frameless windows tend to have a lip around them to reduce wind noise – my ’13 mustang is like this, and the power windows go down an eighth of an inch when I pull the door handle. Kudos to Ford, though – when I’ve opened the door with the battery disconnected (doing maintenance in the driveway) the windows sort of scrub against that exterior lip, but since it is rubber too, the door opens fine anyway. This is the way.
I wonder if moving away from rain gutters in the 80s might have also caused a change in seal design.
Yup that is the way it is in my 2004, my MIL’s previous and current convertibles.
Another thing to consider, as pointed out by Lewin Day a while back, is that some cars make it unable to unlock the door from the inside if the doors have been locked by the key fob. My BMW E39 does this. This is not a safe feature.
I think shifters and door handles are two things that should be immediately apparent to any new user without any special knowledge. In the case of door handles I think it should be government mandated, but right now we can’t even have food safety so I’ll keep dreaming.
I’d think Uber and Lyft should make it a requirement for a car model to be eligible but they’re run by techbros too.
IIHS maybe?
As far as I’m concerned that model Y rear door emergency release tips the line into actively malicious. I guess if I just trimmed my nails I get to DIAF? I’m surprised they didn’t print “Beware of the Leopard” on the pop out panel (with apologies to Douglas Adams).
There’s a number of reasons to cancel ubers when it pops up with a Tesla, but the door handle one is a strong argument for avoiding them.
I bought yellow straps to attach to the manual releases. They have hook fasteners to grip the carpet lining the pocket. And yellow so they’re impossible to miss when looking down. They work fine. It was still annoying to have to spend my own money to fix an issue that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place.
The fact that we’ve reached the point where this article makes perfect sense…well, it’s proof we’re right back to 1900 in terms of vehicular consistency.
In another 100 years, whatever cyborgs are running lighthearted websites will have a section dedicated to all the nonsensical stuff that we tried, all because we felt bored with the status quo.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to perfectin my voice operated handgun. It turns out the passphrase “Freeze, get on the ground” was not ideal.
I was about to write the same thing.
It generally doesn’t take long to establish some standards that pretty much everyone agrees make sense. Examples:
For some unknown reason manufacturers are currently in a cycle of “why the hell don’t we change this for no good reason” and it drives me nuts. Examples:
It has been mentioned before, but there are some controls that should be in a standard place on all vehicles for the sake of safety and/or ease of use. The only reason to change this is when an overwhelming weight of evidence shows that the ‘norm’ is more dangerous than the alternative.
Just be glad the hazard button is mandated to be a separate, physical button, or you’d never find it.
They should mandate that it has to be the ugly rugged little button that you used to have to pull on the top of the steering column. It isn’t a competitive disadvantage if everyone has to do it.
The yout’ call it gamification. Pointless complexity because it’s ‘cool’.
Non-mechanical door latch systems of any kind should be banned.
All cars should be required to have a mechanical latch release as the main door release. No one is asking for more complicated doors.
I basically want my car to change up the exit procedure every time I get out. Make it like a mobile escape room!
“In this car is everything you need to solve the Druid’s Puzzle!”
The Viper has the best design I can think of. If there’s no power, you just pull the handle *farther* to open the door mechanically. Intuitive, easy, and seamless.
It’s what you’d do while panicking anyway.
The mechanism for the rear is unconscionable, given that children are likely to be rear seat passengers. How would you explain to a child how to get to the release?
Time permitting, Matt should get his kid to figure it out herself and publish the time it takes as part of the review. At least assuming the test car shows up before he has to take her anywhere in it. Jason too, since Otto’s about to age into prime getting-into-friends-random-cars age
Man, talk about redesigning the wheel! I understand and respect the loop door pulls on the Fiat, but there is an awareness/labelling issue. The rest though…