Elon Musk promises Tesla Model 3 safety improvements after crash
The comments come after a Redditor totaled his Model 3 and pointed out some things.
It usually doesn't take long between a hotly anticipated car's debut and seeing one smashed into a million little pieces. That's the case with the Tesla Model 3, but Elon Musk is already looking in to ways to improve the car based on just one crash.
The aptly named Reddit user "Model_3_Crash_Dummy" was involved in a very serious crash and brought the tale to Reddit, complete with an image gallery. The Redditor claimed the accident was serious enough to total the car, and from the gallery, I'd believe that.
The crash was obviously very serious, but thankfully, the occupants survived with few injuries, none of which appear to be serious.
Thankfully, injuries were minimal -- the Redditor suffered a small right foot injury from the gas pedal. The passenger was a bit worse off, her arm having broken the infotainment screen, resulting in some cuts. That broken infotainment screen also removed the only way to open the glove compartment, preventing the driver from being able to easily access his insurance documents.
In response to both the broken screen and the glove box problem, Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter and suggested future Model 3 improvements to eliminate these issues. His tweet discusses both automatically opening the glove compartment after a crash, as well as bonding a layer of plastic to the infotainment screen in order to hold it together better.
Adding software feature to open glovebox automatically when car comes to a stop after a crash. Will look at bonding a thin plastic sheet to the front or back of screen.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 16, 2018
Automakers do their best to anticipate how things will go wrong during crashes, and of course, all vehicles are submitted to thorough federal crash tests before they can be sold to the public. But you never really know what's going to happen until things move to the real world, and it's nice to see Musk already considering ways to improve the Model 3 based on a single incident.
Odds are, the glove compartment fix can be beamed to Model 3s via an over-the-air update, but the screen improvement will require new hardware, and thus must likely be performed on the assembly line or after the fact (via some sort of screen protector, maybe?) at a dealership.
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