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Comment by chimen | Hacker News Reader

The biggest one, which you missed, is the fact that the car could not be put in neutral making it impossible to push outside the lane. If my car dies on a 6 lane HW I make sure to get it to the safe lane first; I'm not staying there like dead meat waiting for some truck to hit me at 130km/h

Every car, no matter of it's running state, unless it is damaged at the mechanical components, should be able to place in neutral and pushed in situations like this.

This is my beef with these electric cars and non electric cars (but with electric parking system/shift)

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After a malfunction like this, a car without a mechanical e-brake can be left in two states, both dangerous -- free rolling or locked in place.

You can always secure a manual car or a car with a parking pawl by shifting into gear or P, so I assume it's more okay to leave them in the free-rolling state if they die completely.

But you can't do the same in a Tesla which doesn't have a parking pawl, so I assume someone made the decision that a forever-locked-up Tesla is safer than a forever-free-rolling Tesla.

I also agree that should be an even-more-emergency mechanism (like a valve on the brake circuit) you could operate manually to disable the emergency lock-up, but in the case of a Tesla fiddling with that hypothetical valve would also disable your brakes completely sooo. Dunno. The car just doesn't have enough hardware.

Isn't mechanical brakes still a requirement for any car? So it's rolling when brake is not pressed, and stops when brake is pressed?

I'm not sure what you mean by "mechanical brakes". The brakes on a Tesla are normal hydraulic car brakes that do exactly that. They work even without power (more force required, of course). But just like in many modern cars, there is no separate manual parking brake.

So put a lever on the brake.

There's no way I'd try to push a car stuck in a highway lane. I would abandon my car and get to off the highway ASAP. That's a super dangerous situation.

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