I was in a car crash as a child. Two cars caught fire, although I didn't realise it until I got out.
My door was blocked by another vehicle, as was my dad's. He was busy trying to get my sister to open her front passenger door, so he could clamber out after her.
The other rear door was damaged, and I had to pull the latch and then kick it to open it. (Not sure how that would work with one of these small manual release things.)
But parents: if you have a daft car with electronic doors, make sure your children know where the manual release is, both front and rear.
It might also be good to have a car window breaker tool (or maybe more than one) someplace easy to reach. They usually also include a seat belt cutter so you can get out of the crash has jammed your seat belt mechanism.
Some newer cars have switched from tempered glass to laminated glass for their side windows though which may make these tools useless on your car, so check that first.
Here's an article on these tools [1]. Here's one on the move to laminated glass [2].
Here are some links to window breakers that you might be able to find in stock locally and a couple at Amazon [3,4,5,6,7].
How does this work in a plain-old car with child locks set on the rear doors?
My children had opened the doors while the car was moving at least once before I had to use the child locks; now, as far as I can tell, nobody is getting out of the back doors unless they're opened from the outside.
Uninjured children can probably climb through to the front and use those doors, even if the driver is injured. I would think a 5 year old should manage that? But they would be familiar with how the doors normally open, and probably not an emergency release handle.
Maybe on some supermodern cars (which probably won't open at all after the crash breaks a few computers in there). But in all cars I have owned, the safety switch was mechanical, not electronic. If it's working, you can lower the window and open from the outside. But generally, children old enough to be able to take care of themselves in a car accident should probably have the safety unlocked already.
That's it isn't it; by the time my children are old enough to be able to do this, the child locks won't be on. I guess that's when they're old enough to be told not to open the doors "until it's safe" and actually listen and understand.
In my car they're mechanical, as I assume they still are in most modern, non-hyper-modern cars (like Teslas) so my curiosity was more of a "is there an exit strategy if the child locks are on and it's not possible to exit through the front doors"?
There's no mechanical override inside the boot (trunk) that I'm aware of and the mechanical child locks also have no internal override (that I'm aware of).
I guess in case of emergencies, the windows are the best exit strategy in such a hypothetical situation.
My impression is that all cars are intended to have a safety unlock in the trunk. I assumed it was mostly in case someone gets stuck inside, but maybe it's to escape through back seats in an accident.
That sounds super hard to pull off though, especially if injured and with an adrenaline rush that might help you problem solve but if this stuff is never habitually used it seems like a challenge even with no stress or urgency.
It's an escape room unless you've read the manual closely and practiced...
