Today, a report that a woman from Scottsdale, Arizona, put her 20-month-old granddaughter into her Tesla to go to the zoo is circulating. The grandmother buckled the toddler in, closed the door, and walked around to the EV‘s left front door.

By that time, the vehicle’s electronics powered completely off. “I closed the door, went around the car [to get] in the front seat, and my car was dead,” Renee Sanchez told Arizona’s Family On Your Side team. “I could not get in. My phone key wouldn’t open it. My card key wouldn’t open it.”

In Arizona, temperatures regularly cross 100 degrees Fahrenheit. As such, it doesn’t take long for vehicle cabins to become fatally hot. 

The responding fire department broke the window glass to get the child out. “And when they got here, the first thing they said was, ‘Uggh, it’s a Tesla. We can’t get in these cars,’” Sanchez recalled. “And I said, ‘I don’t care if you have to cut my car in half. Just get her out.’”

Many EV drivers – and some first responders – don’t know how to unlock the doors if the battery dies. While Tesla owner’s manuals describe various ways to manually open the doors from the inside, there doesn’t seem to be an easy procedure if you’re locked outside the vehicle. 

In fact, according to Tesla’s Model Y Emergency Response Guide, there isn’t a spelled-out method for opening the doors from the outside without power. It does state that in the event of a collision, it might not be possible to open the doors from the outside, and access to passengers may require extrication.

Of course, non-EV cars are often accidentally (let’s be honest: often purposely) locked with children or pets inside. In these cases, first responders sometimes resort to breaking window glass to open the door.

In Sanchez’s incident, she claims to have had zero control over the situation, which shook her.

Teslas typically display three warnings before the battery dies

However, Arizona’s Family reported that the Tesla service department confirmed that Sanchez hadn’t received any warnings before she experienced the power loss.

Sanchez says that this event gave her pause about owning her EV. “When that battery goes, you’re dead in the water…I give Tesla props. When it works, it’s great. But when it doesn’t, it can be deadly.”

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