Rear doors do not open from the inside when the car is locked

We discovered something peculiar today on our 2007. If the car is locked either front door can be opened with its inside handle. However, if the car is locked neither rear door can be opened with its inside handle. I looked in the manual and didn't see anything that described this.

This isn't the child safety lock. I verified that when the car is unlocked the child safety locks work as expected, and they make no difference when car is locked.

 

It seems like it would be a bit of a problem for back seat passengers if the locked car they were riding in was in a wreck that incapacitated the front seat passenger(s). There is no unlock button in the rear. We carry escape tools (for cutting belts, breaking windows) in the front, but not in the back. We don't have rear seat passengers very often though, which is why we never noticed this until now.

 

After the preceding post I put on my "very up close" glasses and had a better look at the lock indicator, and sure enough, it has raised areas for finger grip, like in the picture, and it does indeed lock and unlock the door. All this time I thought that was only a lock indicator.

I completely misread that page of the manual when we first got the car. There are four pictures on it, with the two on the right (21P010B,21P011B) showing the master lock/unlock switches on the two front doors. I read the text as applying (only) to those switches, with the picture shown above just showing the motion of the lock indicator. It turns out the instructions for those master switches are actually on the next page. In my defense, there are no labels in the pictures or references to picture numbers in the text to indicate what is a "lock knob" and what is a "lock switch". Also, the "lock knob" is not a knob, at least under the usual English usage of that word. To my eye the lock switch and lock knob are both the same shape, which doesn't help. The switch feels like a rocker switch though, while the knob feels like a rotary mechanism controlled by the edge of a (section of a ) disk attached to its central shaft, with two detentes and a very limited range of motion. There is probably a motor on that shaft too, controlled by the master switches. Edge on rotary mechanisms for controlling things are not very common. There are thumbwheels, and for those of you old enough to remember, devices like the tuner on a Marantz receiver, that metal and rubber piece in the upper right corner:



Perhaps the text is less ambiguous in Japanese.

I may not learn something new every day, but I did today.

Thanks.

 

The car the Prius replaced was a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid and our other car is a 1998 Accord EX. On both of these the rear doors are unlocked/locked by pulling up/pushing down on the pop up located at the front of the door near the bottom of the glass. Just like cars going back for decades before that, but with the pops not having the older sort of broader top, making them harder to grab with a tool so that they cannot be as easily fished with a coat hanger. Apparently newer cars have gone over to door lock mechanisms like the Prius and dispensed with the pop ups entirely. It's a good thing that the Accord has that pop up, because half the motor driven mechanisms have failed, so we just control those manually. On another car I might have fixed the motorized ones, but Honda in its wisdom buried this mechanism in a deep crevasse within the door frame, making working on it a major PITA.

Looking into this further, apparently some cars now have entirely electric control of not only the door lock mechanism but also the door handle. Now there is a spectacularly bad idea. These cars have emergency door handle releases, but they don't seem to be very well marked.

How to Escape Your Car If the Electronic Door Handle Fails - Consumer Reports

 

The 2003 Civic's door locks were more or less the same shape as those in the 1993 Accord diagram. This is a picture of a rear door from 2004 (same design 2003-2005):



This can easily be unlocked with one finger, which is convenient when both hands are full.

Honda may have had some problem with the non-pop up design in the mid 80's and went back to pop ups for a while. Oddly they seem to have been using two different pop up designs more or less simultaneously from the mid 90's to at least the mid 2000's.