As if making the car electric wasn't puzzling enough for the first response teams, Tesla decided to put some additional strain on these guys by equipping the Model X with a set of Falcon Wing doors.
At first glance, you'd think their job is pretty straight forward: you get to the vehicle, you pull out your freakishly strong power-tools, and you start hacking at the car's body until there's a clear way to extract the victim.
Having witnessed a similar exercise - on regular ICE cars, though - I can tell you first-hand that is far from the truth. There is a ton of procedures that need to be carried out to ensure everybody is safe throughout the whole process, and skipping any one of them might turn out to have disastrous consequences. And since these teams are usually called when things are already pretty bad, you really don't want to add to that.
If you're easily bored, you can jump straight to the 2:05 mark when the action begins, but hearing the announcer's presentation might not be such a bad idea since he explains what we're about to see and why they do things the way they do it.
This Model X dismemberment took place at the 2017 Fire Department Instructors Conference. The Palo Alto company provided the vehicles (yes, there are two Model Xs) while Hurst Jaws of Life was responsible for tearing them apart.
After cutting the main power - the first thing the rescue teams need to do when dealing with an electric vehicle - the self-presenting handle on the Model X's doors is as useful in opening the door as an apple pie. In come the tools that look like they could rip through the Earth's core if they had to, pushing the door away so that the second guy can step in with his claw-like instrument and cut away the hinges.
The Falcon Wing doors, on the other hand, require a different approach. It involves the same type of hands-on attitude, but the doors need to be cut in half first at their middle hinge, separating the top to the bottom part. After that, the rescuers are just a few pulls away from gaining access and extracting whoever was caught inside.
If you have no intention of joining a firefighter unit, then this video is probably of no real use to you. However, it's not everyday you get to see a $100,000+ vehicle getting hacked and dismembered behind a glass wall with people watching in awe.
"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie) Full profile
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