Tesla To Up Date Model X Gull Wing Door Software To Avoid Guillotining Owners

Given Elon Musk's habit of revealing snippets of information when he talks, electric-car advocates, owners, and industry analysts pore over any live event at which the Tesla Motors CEO presents.

On June 1, the Silicon Valley carmaker held its annual shareholder meeting, which clocked in at a remarkable three and a half hours.

Among many topics covered at the event, Musk discussed the continuing challenges related to the "falcon doors" of the pricey and complex Tesla Model X electric crossover SUV, its newest vehicle.

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TheSteve - 6/8/2016 9:07:41 AM

0 Boost

re: "...the continuing challenges related to the "falcon doors" ..."

These troublesome and expensive doors exist only as a marketing gimmick, for "cool factor", rather than for engineering reasons such as practicality, durability, reliability, usability, etc.

MDarringer - 6/8/2016 9:10:48 AM

+2 Boost

And assuming Tesla engineered the X for crash protection, having that much real estate in the vehicle's body dedicated to doors would tend to suggest that the platform had to be beefed up--adding weight--to compensate. Conventional doors would have been just fine and the X would have had as many customers anyway. Heck, tesla could buy Pontiac Azteks and put the Tesla name on it and people would line up.

mre30 - 6/8/2016 12:20:55 PM

+2 Boost

My two friends who own Model X's say that the novelty of the electric doors wears off about two weeks after delivery and that at that point they all just become a huge annoyance.

For example, if you are in a hurry, you have to wait for the doors to open and then because of the quality issues you can't really just 'slam' the door and quickly walk away from the car, because you need to wait to ensure the doors actually fully close.

The Falcon doors are the answer to the question no one ever asked!

The strange, non-folding second row is also high on the list of annoyances. The third row is kind of small and Acura MDX sized.

The Model X is going to end up being a big fail - because it is just an annoying vehicle on a whole bunch of levels.

MDarringer - 6/8/2016 12:33:01 PM

-1 Boost

They potentially make you unsafe if you are trying to get you and your passengers inside due to a threat and you want to get inside, get locked, and get gone. I'm sure that lawsuit is coming soon.

SanJoseDriver - 6/8/2016 1:48:41 PM

+2 Boost

The doors definitely are not meeting expectations. The original "practical" reasons besides looking cool when they open/close were to provide easy access to the 2nd and 3rd rows, to be able to stand in the car to drop a baby down in a child seat verses having to cantilever yourself, and to allow opening doors in very tight spaces.

Sounds good in theory, but it was clearly not worth all of the production delays and issues they are having with them right now. They could have put Model S doors on the car and called it a day, saving falcon wing as a V2 deployment or optional feature in the future. I hope Tesla is able to fix the software so that they function better like Elon promised at the shareholder meeting.