Tailgate Release / Dead Battery

[ILH]

I had an interesting situation occur a couple of weeks ago while I was on vacation. I was travelling south with the family and stopped for a bite to eat. While I was in the '07 suburban in the parking lot, my wife went into the restaurant. By the time she got back, the battery was dead. I mean REALLY dead. Not even enough juice to power the trouble lights on the dash or use OnStar to call for help.

 

However, the most interesting part is that the tailgate of the suburban is power operated - which means without power you cannot manually open it. My son's wheelchair was in the back. I had visions of staying at a local hotel - but wasn't sure how we would get the chair out of the truck!

 

Fortunately a quick boost got us going again and the battery was low because we had accidentally run it down with a cooler running all day in the museum parking lot.

 

It worries me though - the engineers didn't provide a mechanical way to open the tailgate if the battery is dead or disconnected.

[DofD]

Yeah, seems really silly to me as well to not have a manual way to release the rear hatch in some way. If you don't have power, you're screwed.

 

I would think it wouldn't be too hard to put a little trap door in the rear hatch to access a a little pull cord to manually release the latching mechanism.