Well, my verdict is in: The emergency release is a ticking time bomb in the trunk of your Roadster.

The design here is so stupid as to be beyond my comprehension. You have an assembly of all heavy metal parts (as they should be) in your latch mechanism. And in there, with those parts, is a plastic lever-thingy that the emergency release handle is cabled to. This cheap little piece of plastic is asked to slide the actuator down in the latch if someone pulls on the handle from the inside of the trunk. With the fact that plastics can become brittle such an obvious concern, I can't believe they'd rely on it to do the job!

But worse than that, is what happened to me last weekend. I am comfortable now (after spending the last 40 minutes in the garage) to lay blame on that very part. Read on.

Last night, I found the broken off piece of the lever in the little tray around the latch-hook on the back wall of the trunk. I had been wondering where the offending plastic piece that jammed the latch was..... and wondered where it came from. Well, when I found it, I "saw" where it came from: the plastic actuator cam for the emergency release had broken in two. I glued the two pieces together last night. Just now, I put that part back in, to try to understand how this all worked. I can't believe what I am seeing.

The piece of the plastic that is the actuator arm rests in the cavity with the metal actuator from the outside button. These two pieces jar each other during trunk opening and closing operations. (Mostly during the opening, actually.) At one point, sometime Sunday or before, the end broke off the plastic actuator and found it's way down BELOW the point where the metal button's actuator has to swing to open the trunk. (THAT was the problem all along, I just was not sure where the plastic part that was jamming it came from, or where it went after we got the trunk open.)

I will NEVER replace the emergency actuator piece as long as I own this car. I am going to put the trim back, and leave the handle / cable out and store it in the garage. PERHAPS, if I were to sell the car, I'd order the plastic part and put it all in. But it would be (to me) a time bomb in the trunk - wating to spring on the next owner.

If you want to avoid the mess I had on my hands, do this:

1) Open the trunk. (See your manual for instructions.)
2) Use a flatblade screwdriver (or the special tool from an auto parts store) to remove all the insert-thingys holding the trim to the underside of the trunklid.
3) The emergency release cable from the glow-in-the-dark-like-a-haloween-trick emergency handle will be attached to a plastic cam bolted to the latch assembly.

3A) Use a small wrench or pair of pliers to unscrew the built-in nut that is part of this plastic cam assembly from the latch assembly.

4) Remove the emergency handle from the trim piece and put the trim back on.

You are done.

I guess you could disconnect the emergency release cable from the actuator and tape the cable to the underside of the trim and put the trim in - giving the factor appearance of an emergency release - if you wanted to!

Or, just leave things as they are and hope this doesn't happen to you!