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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 fro

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.

jasonpeacock 5y ago
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.
- bumby 5y ago
  How is it configured? Electronically or through a switch on on the door jamb?
  - jasonpeacock 5y ago
    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.
    - bumby 5y ago
      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
      - jasonpeacock 5y ago
        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.
- errcorrectcode 5y ago
  Child locks are usually different. Also, there is typically no child lock option for the driver's side front door.
  - jasonpeacock 5y ago
    These are not child locks. Child locks prevent opening the door regardless of its locked state. This is about whether pulling the door latch auto-unlocks the door, or if you have to unlock the door first before pulling the door latch.
judge2020 5y ago
> 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.
- comeonseriously 5y ago
  > 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. Is it, is that really the issue?
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    It was certainly an issue. If you have a bright red override lever on the door, then they would have known and not had a problem.
- wikibob 5y ago
  This is absurd victim blaming. The problem is there is a door handle that is designed with a failure mode such that pulling the handle DOES NOT OPEN THE DOOR.
  - rabuse 5y ago
    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?
    - brokenmachine 5y ago
      The battery might not have enough juice to unlock the doors, but still not be completely dead. Of course with good design that shouldn't be a problem.
bumby 5y ago
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.
- mauvehaus 5y ago
  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. [0] Why? Why do kids do anything, really?
  - bumby 5y ago
    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. https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/52480/is-the-drivers-door-supposed-to-unlock-from-inside https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/52480/is-the-d...
mdp2021 5y ago
> 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.)
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
> 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.
- phkahler 5y ago
  You could also climb over and exit the other door.
- bigiain 5y ago
  > 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?
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    This made my day. You're 100% spot on. I laughed loudly at the absurd truth you painted for me. Low effort comment I know, but I had to let you know.
  - unobatbayar 5y ago
    > unlockyourtoyota.ru The fact that it's a russian site made my day. Russian hackers man...
alistairSH 5y ago
Sure enough, Corvettes since the mid-00s (at least) have electronic doors. Here's a video describing how to use the manual overrides (none are in plain sight)... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLDqmGQU6L0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLDqmGQU6L0 Here's a photo of thee door interior (with no mechanical door pull)... https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/7I8AAOSwF-tgN5U1/s-l300.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/7I8AAOSwF-tgN5U1/s-l300.jpg
- bigiain 5y ago
  A long time ago, a friend bought a kit for one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purvis_Eureka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purvis_Eureka I spent a lot of time helping build it. 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...
  - sbierwagen 5y ago
    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.
skykooler 5y ago
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.
jjk166 5y ago
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.
- silisili 5y ago
  There was no accident here, unless I missed something. The guy just lost power to his door locks after he got in.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    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."
    - ntp85 5y ago
      "You're holding it wrong"
    - phkahler 5y ago
      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.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  This is why I carry a safety hammer utility tool in my cars for breaking glass and cutting seatbelts.
gambiting 5y ago
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.
- maxerickson 5y ago
  What do you mean by modern? My 2013 car has a physical lock pull, which the door lever is connected to, so the lock opens when you pull the lever to open the door.
- outworlder 5y ago
  > 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.
  - fionaellie 5y ago
    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 https://youtu.be/QCIo8e12sBM?t=239
  - filoleg 5y ago
    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.
seanp2k2 5y ago
They have a button that you hit with your thumb, not a mechanical handle. The manual door open lever is down by the driver's left foot (passenger's right foot) https://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/corvette-stingray/2014/long-term-road-test/2014-chevrolet-corvette-stingray-push-button-door-handles.html https://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/corvette-stingray/2014/lon...
phkahler 5y ago
>> 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.
BuildTheRobots 5y ago
I always thought this was the case until I owned a 2004 Nissan and accidentally locked my brother in.

jasonpeacock 5y ago

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.

bumby 5y ago
How is it configured? Electronically or through a switch on on the door jamb?
- jasonpeacock 5y ago
  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.
  - bumby 5y ago
    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
    - jasonpeacock 5y ago
      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.
errcorrectcode 5y ago
Child locks are usually different. Also, there is typically no child lock option for the driver's side front door.
- jasonpeacock 5y ago
  These are not child locks. Child locks prevent opening the door regardless of its locked state. This is about whether pulling the door latch auto-unlocks the door, or if you have to unlock the door first before pulling the door latch.

judge2020 5y ago

> 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.

comeonseriously 5y ago
> 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. Is it, is that really the issue?
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  It was certainly an issue. If you have a bright red override lever on the door, then they would have known and not had a problem.
wikibob 5y ago
This is absurd victim blaming. The problem is there is a door handle that is designed with a failure mode such that pulling the handle DOES NOT OPEN THE DOOR.
- rabuse 5y ago
  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?
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    The battery might not have enough juice to unlock the doors, but still not be completely dead. Of course with good design that shouldn't be a problem.

bumby 5y ago

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.

mauvehaus 5y ago
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. [0] Why? Why do kids do anything, really?
- bumby 5y ago
  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. https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/52480/is-the-drivers-door-supposed-to-unlock-from-inside https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/52480/is-the-d...

mdp2021 5y ago

> 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.)

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

> 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.

phkahler 5y ago
You could also climb over and exit the other door.
bigiain 5y ago
> 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?
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  This made my day. You're 100% spot on. I laughed loudly at the absurd truth you painted for me. Low effort comment I know, but I had to let you know.
- unobatbayar 5y ago
  > unlockyourtoyota.ru The fact that it's a russian site made my day. Russian hackers man...

alistairSH 5y ago

Sure enough, Corvettes since the mid-00s (at least) have electronic doors. Here's a video describing how to use the manual overrides (none are in plain sight)... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLDqmGQU6L0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLDqmGQU6L0 Here's a photo of thee door interior (with no mechanical door pull)... https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/7I8AAOSwF-tgN5U1/s-l300.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/7I8AAOSwF-tgN5U1/s-l300.jpg

bigiain 5y ago
A long time ago, a friend bought a kit for one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purvis_Eureka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purvis_Eureka I spent a lot of time helping build it. 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...
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  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.

skykooler 5y ago

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.

jjk166 5y ago

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.

silisili 5y ago
There was no accident here, unless I missed something. The guy just lost power to his door locks after he got in.
- jjk166 5y ago
  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."
  - ntp85 5y ago
    "You're holding it wrong"
  - phkahler 5y ago
    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.
dv_dt 5y ago
This is why I carry a safety hammer utility tool in my cars for breaking glass and cutting seatbelts.

gambiting 5y ago

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.

maxerickson 5y ago
What do you mean by modern? My 2013 car has a physical lock pull, which the door lever is connected to, so the lock opens when you pull the lever to open the door.
outworlder 5y ago
> 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.
- fionaellie 5y ago
  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 https://youtu.be/QCIo8e12sBM?t=239
- filoleg 5y ago
  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.

seanp2k2 5y ago

They have a button that you hit with your thumb, not a mechanical handle. The manual door open lever is down by the driver's left foot (passenger's right foot) https://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/corvette-stingray/2014/long-term-road-test/2014-chevrolet-corvette-stingray-push-button-door-handles.html https://www.edmunds.com/chevrolet/corvette-stingray/2014/lon...

phkahler 5y ago

>> 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.

BuildTheRobots 5y ago

I always thought this was the case until I owned a 2004 Nissan and accidentally locked my brother in.