Tesla battery dies without warning, trapping toddler inside during sweltering Arizona summer

Let me start out by alleviating any distress because the baby girl was just fine (toxic masculinity to the rescue!), but this story points out what could have been another very deadly design flaw of electric vehicles.

On Wednesday, a local outlet in the Phoenix area reported on a scary turn of events which culminated in a 20-month-old little girl becoming trapped in a hot car in the heat of the day with her frantic grandmother on the outside, before firefighters showed up and freed the toddler. Here are the details, from AZ Family:

The Scottsdale grandmother tells On Your Side that she loaded her 20-month-old granddaughter into her car seat for a trip to the Phoenix Zoo.

‘And I closed the door, went around the car, [to] get in the front seat, and my car was dead,’ she said. ‘I could not get in. My phone key wouldn’t open it. My card key wouldn’t open it.’

As On Your Side explained in a recent report, when the Tesla battery that operates electronics dies, a hidden latch on the driver’s side armrest will manually unlock the door. Many Tesla owners don’t know about this latch.

But in this case, Sanchez was stuck outside of her Tesla while the toddler was trapped inside, buckled into a car seat.

Apparently Tesla cars are supposed to give a series of warnings when the battery is about to die, but Sanchez’s car failed to do so, a claim confirmed by Tesla itself, and I can only assume the extreme Arizona temperature killed whatever charge Sanchez’s battery did have almost immediately—Tesla’s own website states this:

It is expected for a Tesla car to consume around 1% of charge per day while parked. In some cases, you may notice that consumption is higher.

And, I imagine “some cases” would be scorching heat, like the temperatures seen during Phoenix summers; the Tesla website also suggests that after driving, you park in the shade to “reduce power consumption.”

Sanchez’s experience isn’t unique; see this story, also out of the Phoenix area:

A Peoria, Arizona man says he was trapped in his Tesla in the extreme heat after the power died and he didn’t know how to escape.

In November, I wrote about a story in which a woman using a Tesla to unload at a boat ramp became trapped inside when the salt water reacted with the electronics system and caused everything to short-circuit—she, like the Peoria man, didn’t know about the manual release latch, and only escaped because her husband somehow got her out from the outside.

I also still wonder about all the circumstances surrounding the death of Angela Chao, Mitch McConnell’s departed sister-in-law—did her Tesla lock her inside as it rolled into the pond in which she perished?

As Sanchez summed it up, “When that battery goes, you’re dead in the water.”

Seems like there’s a warning here for trading away our traditional gas- and diesel-powered cars for electric ones….

AI image with prompt from Olivia Murray

Image generated by AI.

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