I wonder if the engineer working on this thought “I wonder if someone on YouTube will use this to try and become famous by breaking their finger? Surely not…”
An algorithm that closes the door harder if it meets resistance seems a bit insane, right? What if there’s something fragile? Is this how these auto closing doors normally work? God I’m happy I drive a dumb manual car with no real electronics other than a radio.
I know I'm preaching to the choir at HN, but I really wish there were more "dumb" EVs. Robert Downey Jr. recently hosted a giveaway for his vintage retrofitted electric cars (to clarify, he takes vintage cars and retrofits their engine to make them EVs), and I honestly wish I could just buy one outright.
I love my Chevy Bolt EUV. Normal door handles inside and out. Manual open/close trunk. Normal window controls. Normal infotainment unit with carplay/AA. Buttons and knobs for volume, HVAC, and hazard lights. Normal stick controls for turn signals and wipers.
It’s a great, simple EV and my only knock against it is the slow max charging speed making it not ideal for multiple stop road trips.
I have a 2017 Bolt EV, and I feel similarly. GM accidentally made an ideal EV for a reasonable price, and now they are correcting course by ruining future models.
Note that carplay/AA is already killed for the next model year of the bolt (2026) and you can probably also expect regressions in the number of physical interfaces from the first gen you own.
I'm a huge Tesla fan, but the Bolt is amazing. I love renting them. I wish they could charge faster than 50kW; that would make them useful for road trips.
I feel the same way about e-bikes: expensive, proprietary parts and form factors everywhere. Oh, your battery is worn out? You need one that's custom molded to your downtube? That's too bad.
I think that at least some of this comes about because it's still relatively early days for the form-factor. As the industry matures, as it becomes more cutthroat everything will become more comodified and therefore standardised.
Look at some of the cars of (say) the late-19thC where not even the steering wheel was standard. So, while e-bikes are probably not quite that early stage right now, they've not advanced terribly far from the plain vanilla bicycle yet.
There are thousands of e-bike manufacturers. Many use the so-called "dolphin" battery pack which is fairly standard and always removable. The dolphin doesn't look as sleek as an in-frame battery but it's replaceable and it will usually provide longer range.
I've been expecting a ebike that could take the tool eco-system batteries: DeWalt 60v, Eco 58v, Milwaukee 18v. Probably would need to dock several of them with the exception of the Eco.
Unless you find out it's potted, the BMS needs to be reprogrammed and there's a custom mesh or holder that doesn't work with some standard cells because of tolerances...
Companies that specialise in this do exist, the one I'm most aware of is Electric Classic Cars in the UK (https://www.electricclassiccars.co.uk), who started/specialise in rear-engine VWs, original Minis, and original Land Rover Defenders.
Obviously very tailored for a nostalgic UK market, but if there's not equivalent companies in the US and elsewhere I'd be surprised!
Retrofits for cars are around $50000 to make them barely street legal. You are looking at double the price for that retrofit and you might not get the range. You also have to buy a car (some retrofits on YouTube get around this by buying broken cars and restoring them) buying a broken car could be done if you don't have to do much work or if the engine is broken already.
More realistically, a car manufacturer could make an EV that is basically a vintage car but made to modern standards. Obviously you can’t make the exact same car if you want to have things like crumple zones, but a lot of the changes to car designs have been for fuel efficiency and that’s not as important in an EV. And things like huge internal displays or automatic doors are just preference.
The changes to ICE vehicle designs for fuel efficiency are needed even more and are made more drastic for EVs. EV designs have painful, often ugly, aerodynamic considerations that have to be made. They go so far as to let aerodynamics completely dictate wheel design.
Your 1967 Pontiac GTO sitting on Kragers isnt going to go very far on batteries.
Yeah, but due to range and slow charging vs. refilling, electric cars are mostly used for city/commuting, where speed isn't that high to make a difference in aerodynamics.
You don't need to retrofit, you can just build a reasonably-featured car to begin with. I imagine most people just want a corolla with a battery (or cheaper).
Trouble with my ('95) Corolla is that it's the body that's showing its age. (Rust, and not the good kind.) The ICE is just fine and probably good for another 1/2-million km, but the whole thing has got to go soon.
"Let it rust"? If you live near the sea, cars rust and there's not a lot you can do about it. You can attend to visible rust timeously, but there are plenty of hollow spaces where it can fester for years, all unnoticable, before it pops out through the paintwork.
There’s a quickly growing ev conversion industry. Lots of shops that will take your vintage ride and convert it. the amount of wrecked evs showing up in wrecking yards is resulting in a new era of hotrodding. check out www.openinverter.com
My trunk is push-button. I’ve had to manually hold it in place for it to latch when I’ve had it very full with materials soft enough to compress. It won’t force it on its own.
Would it break my finger if I placed it right on the edge? I don’t know. I never thought to try.
Other cars with self-closing trunks for example, immediately stop if they detect some resistance. I guess other carmakers care more about safety than tesla, at least for the cybertruck (thinking about the vegetable-chopping possible with their trunk).
I can see that if you have very little experience building and selling vehicles in colder climates you just think "oh so there can be ice, let's just allow it to break the ice with more force" instead of, like, not designing the door in that way in the first place.
I got my head bonked by the rear hatch of my SUV due to me hitting the button while I was standing too close to it. Fortunately, it didn't have much force behind it and stopped immediately.
Which tells us there are probably times when we should assume the user is right - for instance, a user taking over control of a self driving vehicle - and some when we should not - closing a door on someone's finger - and it's important to identify the difference.
> God I’m happy I drive a dumb manual car with no real electronics other than a radio.
Me too! I'm not looking forward to my next car. I don't trust a lot of these automatic closing trunks/hoods/etc[1]. But even setting that aside all this complexity is just more stuff that can break and in some cases costs a ridiculous amount to fix. I'd love a car with an EV drivetrain, a radio, power windows, AC, and maybe a small screen (<7") for CarPlay[2]. No other smart features beyond what's mandated by regulation.
One of the oddities about Hacker News is that a solid chunk of the users will reliably rail against Smart TVs, but drool over smart cars with touchscreens and surveillance everywhere.
You're on a forum with literally millions of visitors from all over the world, but with comments on any given article from maybe 100 people.
There could be tens of thousands of "rail against smart tv" users and tens of thousands of "drool over smart cars" users, without there being even a single hypocritical poster who was in both groups.
Tests it with a stick first, and it breaks. Fair enough, it looked like a somewhat flimsy stick, so maybe his finger was stronger.
So then why not test with a stronger stick first? Maybe look up how strong bones are and get a similar one?
Then, going ahead and testing with your most important finger - right index finger — wow.
On the plus side, it's good training as he works up to his Darwin Award. Also, Cybertruck frunk closing motors are strong. Not sure that level of strength is necessary, but maybe users like to over-stuff it with luggage and have it actively compressed by the frunk lid?
I'm not a fan of watching injury videos, so I'm not going to watch it, but if the effect is the same as those putting things like carrots in the hood while it's closing, I'd be shocked if it wasn't.
>The engineer told him the frunk increases in pressure every single time it closes and detects resistance, Judkins said. It’s going to assume you want to close the frunk and maybe something like a bag is getting in the way, which would make it close harder.
>Using this information, that means it closed on my finger harder than my hand and way harder than my arm,” the YouTuber wrote.
This reminds me of a video a few years back of a man sticking his head in the minivan auto-closing door (trying to prove it was safe) and getting stuck.
Had a minivan door close on my shoulder. The censor retracted it immediately, but I still felt a fairly decent impact from it. Definitely wouldn’t want to experience that with my head or anything more crushable.
It is a bit worrying that there were no safety considerations in a portion of the electronics of a vehicle which claims to some degree to support self-driving.
Might be different teams etc, but still can’t be a good look…
It shows a problem in thinking. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." is a good approach for solving some problems, like electronic power trains and unmanned rockets, but a bad one for others, like automatically closing trunks, self driving, and getting a manned mission to Mars.
I'm wondering what are the minimum standards for something to considered safe to drive and if such compliance is publicly available to consumers in any government registry?
The minimum standards are a set of regulations called FMVSS, administered and tested by NHTSA. I'm not aware of any parts of FMVSS that apply specifically to power trunks, but the equivalent force standard for windows is 100N.
FMVSS compliance is largely self-certified by manufacturers though. NHTSA does release test reports of what compliance testing they do, but it's pretty limited.
I believe the door is closed by a normal motor? When an electric motor encounters resistance it draws more current. I assume they just measure the motor current and back away when it exceeds some threshold, increasing that threshold each time.
> These videos may have been funny at first, but watching someone literally break their finger in this perverse display of faith in Tesla or Cybertrucks or Elon Musk more broadly is getting pretty disturbing.
I dunno. Personally, I don't find it that disturbing that a cult member gets out with only a broken finger.
Let's be honest, we all wanted those people telling everyone else that they're "holding it wrong" to get their comeuppance. Negative results of blind loyalty to a corporate figurehead always has some element of schadenfreude for those of us outside the cult.
The messy reality is that there’s a lot of misinformation and a public narrative about Tesla that is largely false. But… there are also kernels of truth!
Maybe some journalist will investigate the root of all of this.
I'm nearly certain Tesla does Astroturfing, which is why I saw 'Tesla quietly provides solar to disaster country' front page of reddit first post, years ago.
Then I think the rest of the automakers realized that they could promote anti-tesla similarly. Have some company write a negative article, upvote farm bomb.
Does he? Or all his tweets are taken out of context and turned 180 degrees around by mass media to gain clicks?
Sure he said few bad things over the years, but overall it's positive.
And don't forget he's got a spectrum diagnosis, on antidepressants, works crazy hours, got beaten to death by black gangs and had terrible childhood by abusive father. Most people like him would end up as a recidivist.
Honestly, have you read his Twitter responses? They are frequently transphobic and conspiratorial. I didn't even have to look very hard to find him clearly calling COVID a "scamdemic" and heavily implying baseless election fraud.
None of the things you mention are valid excuses. This is why PR firms exist. He has chosen, in his hubris, to ignore them.
When someone buys the world's largest communication platform and then uses it to spread hate speech, conspiracy theories, and misinformation - that is absolutely worth criticism.
That's just not how that works. Bending depends on how bad the break is and where it is and how much swelling there is. People break ankles and walk around on them for some days, after all.
I could bend my finger after I broke it... that day, anyway. The next day it was too swollen to bend it. This was a simple and clean break and healed well.
Similar with my elbow. I could bend it at first, then less, and then the swelling really started and I could just barely bend it. I could bend it a little for the xrays, even (I was to do what I could) Weirdly, it didn't even hurt that much just stopped being functional.
That's fair, but he didn't declare it broken in the ER after an x-ray. He declared it broken with a not visibly mangled finger, that by your own description would not have reached the painful point, so color me suspicious of the (probably) clout chasing youtuber.
An algorithm that closes the door harder if it meets resistance seems a bit insane, right? What if there’s something fragile? Is this how these auto closing doors normally work? God I’m happy I drive a dumb manual car with no real electronics other than a radio.