Thats a good point. I guess with the doors the way that they are they’re technically always ‘locked’
Although there’s still a physical lock solenoid built into the doors. You can hear it when you lock and unlock the doors from the inside.
Regardless, its pretty rare that you’d be in a situation where the 12v battery was working fine to open the doors and died in the middle of your trip, causing this situation with a pet or a child inside.
There is no backup key to unlock the door. (And even if there was, you’d also need a way to actuate the door handle from the inside as there’s no external door handle).
I imagine this was done for cost savings as they no longer need to cut keys and matching lock cylinders. But it also has the effect of increasing physical security somewhat as picking the door lock is no longer an attack vector.
It literally does. Its better than Tesla 1000x over. If you pull the inside handles halfway, the electric door latches activate and all 4 doors also have a mechanical override if you pull them all the way.
The problem is not with people getting locked IN, its with people getting locked OUT (possibly with a pet or a child inside).
Since there is no external latch override, if the 12v battery dies and the doors happened to be in the “locked” state when that happened and you were inside and opened the door, its possible that when you shut it behind you, you would now be locked out.
But there’s STILL a way to recover from this point if that happens by using an external battery to open the frunk (where the battery is mounted) and ‘jump start’ the car.
So to recap, this would require the following events to happen in order for it to be a problem:
That order of events is exceedingly rare and I don’t think that many people have actually experienced it. I also want to point out that Tesla is even worse because they have exactly the same problem and dont even have manual overrides on the rear doors so you might actually get locked INSIDE as well.
I don’t know if you noticed, but that key isn’t cut. Ford reused the key design from their other vehicles and just left the key blank. It works great as a screwdriver in a pinch though.