I considered buying a Model 3 but the door handles were the dealbreaker for me.
The standard door handles don't work if the vehicle has a loss of power (such as after a collision).
In the front, there's a manual release in the front seat that's accessible if you know where to look, but would be easy to miss in an emergency.
In the rear, it's almost impossible to access the manual release in an emergency. You have to pull out a floor mat and then pop open a panel that requires a metal tool to extract, and then reach blindly into a hole to pull the release. And this process damages the car, so you can't really practice in a non-emergency.[0]
I couldn't believe I was actually understanding it correctly and that this could be legal in the US, so I called Tesla's hotline and asked how to exit the vehicle in an emergency. The Tesla rep said it's easy to activate the manual release if you know where to look, so I asked how passengers unfamiliar with the car are supposed to use it to escape in an emergency. The rep said, "Oh, it's just a quick 5-minute explanation when they get in."
Apparently, because Tesla decided to put this stupid design on their door rather than one that works without elecricity, it's now the car owner's responsibility to sit every passenger through a 5-minute safety briefing as if they hopped into a 747.
> In the rear, it's almost impossible to access the manual release in an emergency. You have to pull out a floor mat and then pop open a panel that requires a metal tool to extract, and then reach blindly into a hole to pull the release. And this process damages the car, so you can't really practice in a non-emergency.
Just so you know, this is improved the latest (2023+) Model 3. There is now an easily removable panel in the door pocket, with a yellow cable to release the latch.[0]
I still hope they improve the mechanism to not require this, but they did at least improve it a bit in the latest model.
On every other car, you can open the rear door by just using the door handle. No need to remove a panel so you can pull a yellow cable to release a latch so you can open the door.
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked file cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard."
There’s 5 to 10 unique things about Tesla, esp at that price point. But yes let’s focus on door handles and how they behave in an edge case of an edge case.
It's not about banning a particular design, it's about mandating that emergency egress is possible.
If you're ever trapped in a burning car and can't open the fucking doors you might find that requirement to be a little bit less silly than you think it to be.
there was a rich woman that drove into a lake on her estate and drowned because she couldn't open the door in time. you'd think a high profile death of a rich person would change something at least.
>there was a rich woman that drove into a lake on her estate and drowned because she couldn't open the door in time.
Just to expand a bit on vkou's sibling reply, exiting a car that has already gone under water is absolutely non-trivial in any vehicle. Water pressure goes up very fast with depth: at just 10' (3m) deep, just minimum recommended depth for a simple outdoor low dive board pool, you're already at 4.25 psi. At 16.5' (5m) you're up to 7.1 psi.
Just using a tape measure on a more compact car (not my truck) our in the parking lot, a GTI mini, front door is ~1680 in^2 in surface area. So you already cannot open the door if it's air inside and water outside and you're in even 10' of water let alone more. My recollection from driver's ed and then emergency response is that you're supposed to get the window open (by lowering it in time if electric or unshorted or more likely by shattering it with the emergency tool you hopefully have in the car) and let water fill the interior to equalize the pressure, trying to get a last breath from the bubble at the top as long as possible. Then you've got a breath-full-of-air time to get the door open (or get out through the broken window) and get to the surface. And not lose your bearings if it's anything but shallow+bright sunlight, etc., easy to do under water when panicked if you're not well trained to instinctively do tricks like let out a small stream of bubbles to feel which way is up. It's a pretty frightening (and thankfully rare) scenario.
I think I vaguely remember the incident you're talking about, and bad doors certainly didn't help, but it's not the same impact as someone being trapped right on land where 99.9% of vehicles made in history would allow an easy exit.
It's not. It's a figment of stupid engineer circle jerk culture where they'll do all sorts of insane actuator and automation implementations to avoid having to design a simple part to withstand the force of a human operating it.
There are many ways to do a fold flush manual handle/lever and hook that up to a traditional door mechanism.
In my experience, most passengers unfamiliar with the Tesla Model 3 instinctively use the emergency door release in non-emergency situations, rather than pressing the button as intended.
The handles are painted bright red, they have glow strips in the dark, and there are capital letter simple-English and pictographic instructions on how to use them clearly visible.
I have a model Y and it is the first car in my life where I need to give passengers a tutorial on how to enter/exit the car. Also, my mom in the front passenger seat just assumed the emergency door release was the normal one(because she has never pushed a small button to open a door in a car before), and she pulled it and a big "WARNING! YOU MIGHT BREAK YOUR WINDOWS DOING THAT" message popped up on the screen.
Id like to point out that the comment about the manual release is a bit disingenuous since most people accidentally use them when trying to get out as it is more akin to a traditional car than the intended method for opening the doors which is a thumb button. In my anecdotal experience anyway.
Just to share a personal anecdote. The other day me and my wife were getting into an Uber that was a Model 3 and she said to me "I don't know how this door works, can you open it for me".
Sure they are not that hard to figure out but something like door handles shouldn't be something to "figure out" at all, it should be immediately obvious how to open the vehicle.
Beyond that I just dislike electronic door handles in general, yes I get the argument that an electronic handle puts less wear on the car as it can accurately actuate the door release and do it better than a human but every time I have to use a button to exit the car, I always get flashing sirens in my head going "this is a massive point of failure"
You may enjoy the book The Design of Everyday Things. I no longer blame people for pushing on pull doors, but the designers who failed at the appropriate cues.
I find public transit will often use electric doors, but they will also have ways to open the door or window manually in the case of an emergency which seems like the best middleground.
That said, when has a door handle ever been a major point of failure in a personal automobile? Electric door handles on cars for less wear is a bad argument, imo. My internal skeptic says Tesla saves as much money as they can on door latches, so they need it to be electronic to remain gentle enough it won't break.
Often the emergency door mechanisms are very well labeled on public transit —- riding a train I know right away how to stop the train and get the hell out.
The electronic door handle being a safety issue has been discussed for a very long time and to the point it's surprising it's just now getting this scrutiny. Personally, I don't want to ride in a Tesla and this is one of a few reasons.
> The Bloomberg investigation found numerous instances of passengers who were killed or severely burned by post-crash fires when rescuers on the scene were unable to open the doors.
Have any of these incidents result in major law suits? Seems pretty likely they would and should sue.
Honeslt yI hate modern automotive designs. My one wish for the Chinese EV makers was that one of them just makes a friggin normal car that's an EV without stupid gimmicks abut no, doesn't seem like the industry has the ability to design a reliable car.
That quote is from the linked article/CNN, it is a summary, you can read the original reporting from Bloomberg if you wish to learn more about what they found.
> An investigation by Bloomberg found 140 incidents of people being trapped in their Teslas due to problems with the door handles, including several that resulted in horrific injuries.
The above is from CNN, but in the original bloomberg article, I don’t see any specifics. If I was a writer, and the number of incidents was high, I would want to specify it to maximize engagement.
So I prone to assume when they don’t share data and instead use vague descriptions, it is probably because the data is not compelling enough to present.
> Complaints about Tesla’s electrically powered doors also pervade NHTSA’s database that the agency uses to identify potential defects. Bloomberg identified more than 140 consumer complaints related to Tesla’s doors getting stuck, not opening or otherwise malfunctioning since 2018. While it’s difficult to assess how that compares with other models with similar doors, the regulator has taken notice.
I don't own a Tesla, but I've been a passenger in well north of 100 different ones over the years (Uber/Bolt/etc.) and had no idea there even was a mechanical release. In the event of an emergency I would... not fare well.
Years ago (decades now?) I remember James May on Top Gear doing a segment where he was looking for the first mass-produced car that "looked like a car". Of course there have been tons of changes, but it's also amazing to me how much some things are still the same 100 years later.
Particularly when it comes to safety devices it just seems like you shouldn't mess with that combination of intuitive design and ingrained societal learning from media. It's literally something a child can do...
You would think the therac-25 was enough of an engineering lesson on designing safety-critical systems in software that lack hardware redundancy. Maybe they didn't consider the door handles "safety critical".
I don't know about hardware redundancy, but yes for at least "easily verifiable limiters".
What is "hardware" anyway? Does a microcontroller-based integrator or debouncer count? Depending on how you define that, it can become a serious roadblocker. But anyway, I guess that point is moot for a door handle, you can fix it with stuff that is unambiguously hardware.
Another lesson not learnt from therac-25 (and really most disasters caused by humans) is that safety is a cultural issue, that needs to be taken seriously from top to bottom in the organization.
I see a lot of questioning as to why this isn't required by regulation around this topic. I have no idea, but my intuition would be that it simply never occurred to regulators to require that door handles work? That door handles be accessible? Could it be that simple?
Companies come and go. The idea is that we have simple, efficient, long lasting gov orgs that can make sure each new company doesn’t repeat moronic mistakes like this in the name of design.
The funny thing is that Elon has been very critical of regulation in car design, such as the rules around the side-view mirrors (he wanted to get rid of them and replace with cameras).
But then they find something unregulated and manage to flub it so badly it makes a strong case for regulation.
I'm not sure if Elon was involved in these door handles on the interior, though I do recall he was very involved in the early touch-to-expose exterior handles and insisted they use them despite internal engineering pushback. I think a lot of the bad engineering designs seem to originate from internal engineers getting overruled by Elon.
I always found what we regulate and don't regulate when it comes to motor vehicles interesting...
Demanding Tesla's need door handle regulation because of safety concerns lacks perspective given how relatively safe Teslas are, and that current regulation allows people to buy vehicles which go 60MPH+ on just two wheels, no airbags, and no doors at all.
It would be cool if Tesla can come up with something a bit safer if there are problems with their door handles, but ultimately I think the only regulation required would be transparency of safety data. If Tesla's are really dangerous people should know that and decide if they want to buy one anyway. Although two-wheeled motor vehicles are death traps, I don't think we should introduce regulation requiring all motor vehicles have four wheels. If people want to buy a vehicle with two-wheels, that's up to them.
I disagree that something as insignificant as a car door handle needs to be regulated to save at best a handful of lives a year – lives which probably could have been saved more effectively with other safety changes (perhaps many of which Teslas already have). Ultimately if you're in a car where your life depends on the design of a door handle, that's a problem already, and not one door handle regulation will necessarily be best suited to address.
Just let manufacturers innovate... If a car is extremely unsafe so long as consumers know that then manufacturers will have a strong incentive to improve safety in innovative ways.
Bloomberg found over 140 people who had suffered injuries in Tesla crashes due to Tesla using a non-standard mechanism for opening the doors.
To put things in comparison, there were fewer injuries associated with the infamous Ford Pinto and its explosive fuel tank, and that was considered one of the most dangerous cars ever made in the U.S.
This isn't a failure of regulation. It's a failure of engineering culture. It's an industry fad or circle jerk, same as any other.
Blaming "but the law didn't say I couldn't do this" fails to properly ascribe blame and serves to excuse the peddlers of bad culture.
The Telsa handle and copycats are figment of stupid engineering circle jerk culture allowed to run unrestrained. These people are disposed to do all sorts of insane actuator and automation implementations to avoid having to design a simple part to withstand the force of a human operating it.
There are many ways to do a fold flush manual handle/lever and hook that up to a traditional door mechanism and/or make it automatic (the latter is a feature of every high end minivan side door in the past 20yr).
The problem isn't that there was no regulator saying no The problem is that they wanted to do the stupid at all. If there was a law forbidding this particular implementation of stupid they'd find a different one. You can't legislate them all. You have to solve the culture.
She was highly intoxicated and driving under the influence, reversed the car into a pond and died because of it. Whether or not the doors contributed to her death is a guess at best. When a car is submerged, you aren't able to open a door generally due to the weight of the water pushing in on the car. That car has a completely standard gear stalk as well, so blaming it on that make no sense.
I don't have sympathy for those who DWI. Luckily, she didn't kill anyone else.
She drowned in a glass coffin surrounded by her loved ones unable to figure out how to get her out. You are able to open a normal car door when the interior is fully submerged due to the water pressure equalizing. It's very clear to me she would have survived with normal door handles and your "anyone who DWIs deserves to die and doesn't receive sympathy cause I worship Elon Musk/Tesla" position is truly contemptible.
See the issue is you don't know the facts of this case, and call anyone who disagrees with you "worshiping Elon Musk"
This car (2020 MX) had a normal mechanical door handle that works perfectly fine without electrical power. She was highly intoxicated and couldn't figure that out.
Her death was caused by herself and only herself. She was too intoxicated to understand how to open the door while it was submerging. If she attempted to open the door as it was submerged, it would have opened fine.
Please research the case before spewing ad hominin attacks.
Fair enough, people have died in other submerged vehicles before, this isn't unique to Tesla and I do not know enough about the exact details of how this model performs submerged, or confounding factors like the temperature of the water and her actions while panicking.
China is preparing to require obvious manual handles for car doors.
China's own vehicle manufacturers have been copying Tesla in this, so it affects far more cars in China than Tesla products.[1]
When I've rented cars with electronic door poppers instead of conventional door handles, I've found them annoying. Do many people actually prefer them?
Purely mechanical flush exterior door handles are possible if aerodynamics (or giving the impression of trying too hard to be aerodynamic) are a factor. Aircraft have used them for decades. Several older cars have used them including the Chevrolet Corvette (third generation), Subaru XT, Fiat Barchetta, and Pontiac Grand Prix (third generation).
I bought a Model 3 in 2018, a Y in 2020, and another 3 in 2024. The end user design has only continued to get worse on various aspects of the car. Regarding non-safety issues, living in the northeast and mid-Atlantic, the door handles freeze shut during the winter and become impossible to open from outside of the car.
But why continue to buy these poor end-user design experiences, you think? My car maintenance costs since 2018 has been a gallon of windshield wiper fluid and new tires. So I deal with poor design decisions.
But the cup holders in the latest Model 3 may be my breaking point.
My car maintenance costs since 2018 has been a gallon of windshield wiper fluid and new tires.
If you're buying a new car every two years, you could get the same low level of maintenance with an ICE Toyota. Or, you know, you can buy an EV from a company that knows how to make a door handle, and still get that low maintenance of an EV. There are many to choose from.
>My car maintenance costs since 2018 has been a gallon of windshield wiper fluid and new tires
Just to be clear, you keep buying stupid and poorly designed cars to save a couple hundred dollars on oil changes? Which are the ONLY maintenance item you need to do on any brand new ICE from purchase to about 100k miles?
You repeatedly purchase brand new, luxury priced, "new car premium" priced cars to save a few hundred dollars?
Uhhh.... What?
My ICE car's entire maintenance budget since I purchased it 5 years ago has been about $300 worth of oil changes, once per year, and Europeans claim that's way too often.
Electric retractable door handles is such a stupid gimmick.
I once pulled over to help a stranded Model S driver with a flat tire in the Mojave desert. Every door handle had a zip tie hanging off it because they _all_ had failed present mechanisms.
If manufacturers in general were serious about improving efficiency they'd stop putting huge heavy wheels on everything, instead of chasing fractions of a percent with overcomplicated and failure-prone door handles.
Side bonus, smaller wheels with taller sidewall tires are more comfortable, less prone to damage, and the tires are cheaper and easier to replace, too!
Agreed. Plus the choices were never electrically actuated Vs. standard, plenty of vehicles before Tesla had flush fully mechanical doorhandles that reduced the drag coefficient.
Tesla did it to be different, futuristic, and to show off. Then plenty of other electric vehicle manufacturers copied. Even ignoring the safety issues, these things had reliability problems since almost inception and could be frozen shut in the winter.
Between the door handles, removing the turn signal stalk, removing the wiper stalk, non-round non-drive-by-wire wheel, and now putting the shifter in the ceiling, Tesla has made a lot of unforced errors to try to stand out.
Because you don't need to use that shifter regularly; you shift gears on the screen in that car and they have capacitive buttons near the caution lights on the ceiling as a redundant backup.
If you're driving in a competitive, sanctioned high-speed race, sure, fine. Save every bit of drag possible. At highway speeds in a normal-person shaped vehicle, they cannot possibly make a measurable difference.
Not really. Stand in front of a car, squint, and observe the size of its silhouette. Now move slightly so that you can see the outline of the door handle, and consider its relative size compared to the rest of the car.
This isn't a perfect comparison. You could design car handles that look like little parachutes attached to something with the drag profile of a dolphin, but that's not a likely situation. In general, the area of the rest of the car is going to be many thousands of times that of the door handle. Given the difficulties in measuring, let alone modeling, turbulent air flow, it would be hard to detect a door handle's drag compared to the rest of the car.
I guess you could attach a meter to the door handle itself to detect how much drag it experiences from its own perspective, and that'd be pretty accurate. My hunch is it'd be an insignificant rounding error compared to the rest of the system.
Top-trim Ioniq 5 has flush door handles for aerodynamic efficiency. Which is more than cancelled out by the stupid 20-inch wheels. Flush door handles are the pop-up headlights of this decade: questionable aerodynamic benefit, reliability issues, and let's be honest, only done to look cool.
(Granted, they're damned nice wheels. When people compliment the car in a parking lot, they usually talk about the wheels.)
I'm old and still somewhat feel electric windows is such a gimmick. For that inevitable day when I run my car off the bridge and into some body of water, I'll be able to get out of my car when I manually roll down my window. Electric windows are a death trap!
At some point, convenience routs safety, and the consumers have spoken
>when I run my car off the bridge and into some body of water, I'll be able to get out of my car when I manually roll down my window.
>You cannot open car WINDOWS under water, electric or not.
>Nobody suggested opening the door. Not even sure how you got there
Uh, you aren't sure how I got there because I didn't. I never even said the word door.
You cannot roll down manual car windows in a sunken car because the pressure of the water jams the mechanism regardless of what powers that mechanism. In a still sinking car, electric windows do not short out and you can roll them down just fine.
I considered buying a Model 3 but the door handles were the dealbreaker for me.
The standard door handles don't work if the vehicle has a loss of power (such as after a collision).
In the front, there's a manual release in the front seat that's accessible if you know where to look, but would be easy to miss in an emergency.
In the rear, it's almost impossible to access the manual release in an emergency. You have to pull out a floor mat and then pop open a panel that requires a metal tool to extract, and then reach blindly into a hole to pull the release. And this process damages the car, so you can't really practice in a non-emergency.[0]
I couldn't believe I was actually understanding it correctly and that this could be legal in the US, so I called Tesla's hotline and asked how to exit the vehicle in an emergency. The Tesla rep said it's easy to activate the manual release if you know where to look, so I asked how passengers unfamiliar with the car are supposed to use it to escape in an emergency. The rep said, "Oh, it's just a quick 5-minute explanation when they get in."
Apparently, because Tesla decided to put this stupid design on their door rather than one that works without elecricity, it's now the car owner's responsibility to sit every passenger through a 5-minute safety briefing as if they hopped into a 747.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PbRBbIGnv4
> In the rear, it's almost impossible to access the manual release in an emergency. You have to pull out a floor mat and then pop open a panel that requires a metal tool to extract, and then reach blindly into a hole to pull the release. And this process damages the car, so you can't really practice in a non-emergency.
Just so you know, this is improved the latest (2023+) Model 3. There is now an easily removable panel in the door pocket, with a yellow cable to release the latch.[0]
I still hope they improve the mechanism to not require this, but they did at least improve it a bit in the latest model.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1jhCz12SKM
On every other car, you can open the rear door by just using the door handle. No need to remove a panel so you can pull a yellow cable to release a latch so you can open the door.
Can it drive itself?
Well, they put a sign on the trash can that says “this is in fact on fire” so you know that they’re aware it’s a dumpster fire.
"Bu look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked file cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard."
There’s 5 to 10 unique things about Tesla, esp at that price point. But yes let’s focus on door handles and how they behave in an edge case of an edge case.
Right, you don't need doors to be easy to open in case of emergency. Because you are a good man, emergency never occurs to you.
The Y also has the redesigned release (from the beginning, afaik).
> I couldn't believe I was actually understanding it correctly and that this could be legal
I think laws are usually reactive. Why would there be a ban on such a silly thing.
It's not about banning a particular design, it's about mandating that emergency egress is possible.
If you're ever trapped in a burning car and can't open the fucking doors you might find that requirement to be a little bit less silly than you think it to be.
No other car company has screwed it up this badly before. Tesla may force it to happen if enough deaths occur.
there was a rich woman that drove into a lake on her estate and drowned because she couldn't open the door in time. you'd think a high profile death of a rich person would change something at least.
>there was a rich woman that drove into a lake on her estate and drowned because she couldn't open the door in time.
Just to expand a bit on vkou's sibling reply, exiting a car that has already gone under water is absolutely non-trivial in any vehicle. Water pressure goes up very fast with depth: at just 10' (3m) deep, just minimum recommended depth for a simple outdoor low dive board pool, you're already at 4.25 psi. At 16.5' (5m) you're up to 7.1 psi.
Just using a tape measure on a more compact car (not my truck) our in the parking lot, a GTI mini, front door is ~1680 in^2 in surface area. So you already cannot open the door if it's air inside and water outside and you're in even 10' of water let alone more. My recollection from driver's ed and then emergency response is that you're supposed to get the window open (by lowering it in time if electric or unshorted or more likely by shattering it with the emergency tool you hopefully have in the car) and let water fill the interior to equalize the pressure, trying to get a last breath from the bubble at the top as long as possible. Then you've got a breath-full-of-air time to get the door open (or get out through the broken window) and get to the surface. And not lose your bearings if it's anything but shallow+bright sunlight, etc., easy to do under water when panicked if you're not well trained to instinctively do tricks like let out a small stream of bubbles to feel which way is up. It's a pretty frightening (and thankfully rare) scenario.
I think I vaguely remember the incident you're talking about, and bad doors certainly didn't help, but it's not the same impact as someone being trapped right on land where 99.9% of vehicles made in history would allow an easy exit.
She was drunk as a skunk, and drowned in a private lake on her estate, which somewhat dampens public outrage and sympathy.
... Also, exiting a sinking car - any make and model of sinking car [1] - is a non-trivial exercise.
---
[1] You might be okay if you're in a convertible with the roof up.
If a car has a physical child lock switch engaged, it's not possible to open the door from the inside even in an emergency.
Clearly rear emergency egress is not a requirement, a child opening the door while going down the highway is a much larger risk.
Why is this desirable? Why is it a good thing that laws only happen after people already die from an avoidable and predictable problem?
I'm sorry I might have chosen my words poorly. I am also advocating more proactive safety crackdown in cases like this.
I'm just relating to the infeasable task of proactively banning permutations of silly designs.
It's not. It's a figment of stupid engineer circle jerk culture where they'll do all sorts of insane actuator and automation implementations to avoid having to design a simple part to withstand the force of a human operating it.
There are many ways to do a fold flush manual handle/lever and hook that up to a traditional door mechanism.
In my experience, most passengers unfamiliar with the Tesla Model 3 instinctively use the emergency door release in non-emergency situations, rather than pressing the button as intended.
>as if they hopped into a 747.
I think escaping the 747 is , thankfully for those who fly , easier.
The handles are painted bright red, they have glow strips in the dark, and there are capital letter simple-English and pictographic instructions on how to use them clearly visible.
I have a model Y and it is the first car in my life where I need to give passengers a tutorial on how to enter/exit the car. Also, my mom in the front passenger seat just assumed the emergency door release was the normal one(because she has never pushed a small button to open a door in a car before), and she pulled it and a big "WARNING! YOU MIGHT BREAK YOUR WINDOWS DOING THAT" message popped up on the screen.
Id like to point out that the comment about the manual release is a bit disingenuous since most people accidentally use them when trying to get out as it is more akin to a traditional car than the intended method for opening the doors which is a thumb button. In my anecdotal experience anyway.
Just to share a personal anecdote. The other day me and my wife were getting into an Uber that was a Model 3 and she said to me "I don't know how this door works, can you open it for me".
Sure they are not that hard to figure out but something like door handles shouldn't be something to "figure out" at all, it should be immediately obvious how to open the vehicle.
Beyond that I just dislike electronic door handles in general, yes I get the argument that an electronic handle puts less wear on the car as it can accurately actuate the door release and do it better than a human but every time I have to use a button to exit the car, I always get flashing sirens in my head going "this is a massive point of failure"
You may enjoy the book The Design of Everyday Things. I no longer blame people for pushing on pull doors, but the designers who failed at the appropriate cues.
I find public transit will often use electric doors, but they will also have ways to open the door or window manually in the case of an emergency which seems like the best middleground.
That said, when has a door handle ever been a major point of failure in a personal automobile? Electric door handles on cars for less wear is a bad argument, imo. My internal skeptic says Tesla saves as much money as they can on door latches, so they need it to be electronic to remain gentle enough it won't break.
Often the emergency door mechanisms are very well labeled on public transit —- riding a train I know right away how to stop the train and get the hell out.
The electronic door handle being a safety issue has been discussed for a very long time and to the point it's surprising it's just now getting this scrutiny. Personally, I don't want to ride in a Tesla and this is one of a few reasons.
Same happened to us... we poked at the door "handle" for a few seconds.
> The Bloomberg investigation found numerous instances of passengers who were killed or severely burned by post-crash fires when rescuers on the scene were unable to open the doors.
Have any of these incidents result in major law suits? Seems pretty likely they would and should sue.
Honeslt yI hate modern automotive designs. My one wish for the Chinese EV makers was that one of them just makes a friggin normal car that's an EV without stupid gimmicks abut no, doesn't seem like the industry has the ability to design a reliable car.
My 2024 car is reliable, comfortable, nice to drive. With big doorhandles, easy to open and no instructions to passengers required.
If any, Chinese cars are usually loaded with bells and whistles to the top.
A normal car of yore with ac that gets from A to B, but is electric. Imagine that.
Why did Bloomberg write numerous instead of specifying the number?
That quote is from the linked article/CNN, it is a summary, you can read the original reporting from Bloomberg if you wish to learn more about what they found.
> An investigation by Bloomberg found 140 incidents of people being trapped in their Teslas due to problems with the door handles, including several that resulted in horrific injuries.
The above is from CNN, but in the original bloomberg article, I don’t see any specifics. If I was a writer, and the number of incidents was high, I would want to specify it to maximize engagement.
So I prone to assume when they don’t share data and instead use vague descriptions, it is probably because the data is not compelling enough to present.
> Complaints about Tesla’s electrically powered doors also pervade NHTSA’s database that the agency uses to identify potential defects. Bloomberg identified more than 140 consumer complaints related to Tesla’s doors getting stuck, not opening or otherwise malfunctioning since 2018. While it’s difficult to assess how that compares with other models with similar doors, the regulator has taken notice.
https://archive.is/2025.09.18-161757/https://www.bloomberg.c...
Did the handles play a role in Angela Chao's death?
I don't own a Tesla, but I've been a passenger in well north of 100 different ones over the years (Uber/Bolt/etc.) and had no idea there even was a mechanical release. In the event of an emergency I would... not fare well.
Years ago (decades now?) I remember James May on Top Gear doing a segment where he was looking for the first mass-produced car that "looked like a car". Of course there have been tons of changes, but it's also amazing to me how much some things are still the same 100 years later.
Particularly when it comes to safety devices it just seems like you shouldn't mess with that combination of intuitive design and ingrained societal learning from media. It's literally something a child can do...
> I've been a passenger in well north of 100 different ones over the years (Uber/Bolt/etc.) and had no idea there even was a mechanical release
I’d say these are grounds for removing them from the rideshare circulation until a user has completed a brief safety course.
You would think the therac-25 was enough of an engineering lesson on designing safety-critical systems in software that lack hardware redundancy. Maybe they didn't consider the door handles "safety critical".
I don't know about hardware redundancy, but yes for at least "easily verifiable limiters".
What is "hardware" anyway? Does a microcontroller-based integrator or debouncer count? Depending on how you define that, it can become a serious roadblocker. But anyway, I guess that point is moot for a door handle, you can fix it with stuff that is unambiguously hardware.
> What is "hardware" anyway? Does a microcontroller-based integrator or debouncer count?
Hmm, good question. In this context, I guess "continues to work after the EMP"?
So, antennas and grid power are forbidden, microprocessors and batteries are permitted?
Do you expect a mechanical wave to come with the EMP or it originates in space?
Another lesson not learnt from therac-25 (and really most disasters caused by humans) is that safety is a cultural issue, that needs to be taken seriously from top to bottom in the organization.
This is clearly not the case with Tesla.
Elon does watch or understand USCSB or their videos, he defunds them because he "knows better".
https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB
I see a lot of questioning as to why this isn't required by regulation around this topic. I have no idea, but my intuition would be that it simply never occurred to regulators to require that door handles work? That door handles be accessible? Could it be that simple?
It reminds me of the rise of SUVs leading to more rollover crashes in the 90s.
Before that, NHTSA didn’t run rollover crash tests - they added rollover crash tests in 2000 in response to SUVs.
Regulatory and safety agencies are usually reactive, and can’t anticipate every market change.
This is a failure of regulation.
Companies come and go. The idea is that we have simple, efficient, long lasting gov orgs that can make sure each new company doesn’t repeat moronic mistakes like this in the name of design.
The funny thing is that Elon has been very critical of regulation in car design, such as the rules around the side-view mirrors (he wanted to get rid of them and replace with cameras).
But then they find something unregulated and manage to flub it so badly it makes a strong case for regulation.
I'm not sure if Elon was involved in these door handles on the interior, though I do recall he was very involved in the early touch-to-expose exterior handles and insisted they use them despite internal engineering pushback. I think a lot of the bad engineering designs seem to originate from internal engineers getting overruled by Elon.
Many countries (EU, Japan) allow cameras instead of side mirrors, but not the US.
I always found what we regulate and don't regulate when it comes to motor vehicles interesting...
Demanding Tesla's need door handle regulation because of safety concerns lacks perspective given how relatively safe Teslas are, and that current regulation allows people to buy vehicles which go 60MPH+ on just two wheels, no airbags, and no doors at all.
It would be cool if Tesla can come up with something a bit safer if there are problems with their door handles, but ultimately I think the only regulation required would be transparency of safety data. If Tesla's are really dangerous people should know that and decide if they want to buy one anyway. Although two-wheeled motor vehicles are death traps, I don't think we should introduce regulation requiring all motor vehicles have four wheels. If people want to buy a vehicle with two-wheels, that's up to them.
I disagree that something as insignificant as a car door handle needs to be regulated to save at best a handful of lives a year – lives which probably could have been saved more effectively with other safety changes (perhaps many of which Teslas already have). Ultimately if you're in a car where your life depends on the design of a door handle, that's a problem already, and not one door handle regulation will necessarily be best suited to address.
Just let manufacturers innovate... If a car is extremely unsafe so long as consumers know that then manufacturers will have a strong incentive to improve safety in innovative ways.
Bloomberg found over 140 people who had suffered injuries in Tesla crashes due to Tesla using a non-standard mechanism for opening the doors.
To put things in comparison, there were fewer injuries associated with the infamous Ford Pinto and its explosive fuel tank, and that was considered one of the most dangerous cars ever made in the U.S.
This isn't a failure of regulation. It's a failure of engineering culture. It's an industry fad or circle jerk, same as any other.
Blaming "but the law didn't say I couldn't do this" fails to properly ascribe blame and serves to excuse the peddlers of bad culture.
The Telsa handle and copycats are figment of stupid engineering circle jerk culture allowed to run unrestrained. These people are disposed to do all sorts of insane actuator and automation implementations to avoid having to design a simple part to withstand the force of a human operating it.
There are many ways to do a fold flush manual handle/lever and hook that up to a traditional door mechanism and/or make it automatic (the latter is a feature of every high end minivan side door in the past 20yr).
The problem isn't that there was no regulator saying no The problem is that they wanted to do the stupid at all. If there was a law forbidding this particular implementation of stupid they'd find a different one. You can't legislate them all. You have to solve the culture.
Ever since reading this story I decided I wasn't buying a Tesla: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68622898
Just so stupid, how many unnecessary deaths in Teslas have there been because of the overengineered crap door handles? Really tragic and pointless.
She was highly intoxicated and driving under the influence, reversed the car into a pond and died because of it. Whether or not the doors contributed to her death is a guess at best. When a car is submerged, you aren't able to open a door generally due to the weight of the water pushing in on the car. That car has a completely standard gear stalk as well, so blaming it on that make no sense.
I don't have sympathy for those who DWI. Luckily, she didn't kill anyone else.
She drowned in a glass coffin surrounded by her loved ones unable to figure out how to get her out. You are able to open a normal car door when the interior is fully submerged due to the water pressure equalizing. It's very clear to me she would have survived with normal door handles and your "anyone who DWIs deserves to die and doesn't receive sympathy cause I worship Elon Musk/Tesla" position is truly contemptible.
See the issue is you don't know the facts of this case, and call anyone who disagrees with you "worshiping Elon Musk"
This car (2020 MX) had a normal mechanical door handle that works perfectly fine without electrical power. She was highly intoxicated and couldn't figure that out.
Her death was caused by herself and only herself. She was too intoxicated to understand how to open the door while it was submerging. If she attempted to open the door as it was submerged, it would have opened fine.
Please research the case before spewing ad hominin attacks.
Fair enough, people have died in other submerged vehicles before, this isn't unique to Tesla and I do not know enough about the exact details of how this model performs submerged, or confounding factors like the temperature of the water and her actions while panicking.
I retract my claim.
China is preparing to require obvious manual handles for car doors. China's own vehicle manufacturers have been copying Tesla in this, so it affects far more cars in China than Tesla products.[1]
[1] https://carnewschina.com/2025/09/05/chinas-auto-regulators-e...
See https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a66052483/china-possible-b...
When I've rented cars with electronic door poppers instead of conventional door handles, I've found them annoying. Do many people actually prefer them?
Purely mechanical flush exterior door handles are possible if aerodynamics (or giving the impression of trying too hard to be aerodynamic) are a factor. Aircraft have used them for decades. Several older cars have used them including the Chevrolet Corvette (third generation), Subaru XT, Fiat Barchetta, and Pontiac Grand Prix (third generation).
I bought a Model 3 in 2018, a Y in 2020, and another 3 in 2024. The end user design has only continued to get worse on various aspects of the car. Regarding non-safety issues, living in the northeast and mid-Atlantic, the door handles freeze shut during the winter and become impossible to open from outside of the car.
But why continue to buy these poor end-user design experiences, you think? My car maintenance costs since 2018 has been a gallon of windshield wiper fluid and new tires. So I deal with poor design decisions.
But the cup holders in the latest Model 3 may be my breaking point.
You can use the app to open the door if the handle is frozen. Still not a great design, might as well have a button instead.
The peak of tech jackassery: "We can fix it in software."
See: Boeing 737-MAX + MCAS
My car maintenance costs since 2018 has been a gallon of windshield wiper fluid and new tires.
If you're buying a new car every two years, you could get the same low level of maintenance with an ICE Toyota. Or, you know, you can buy an EV from a company that knows how to make a door handle, and still get that low maintenance of an EV. There are many to choose from.
>My car maintenance costs since 2018 has been a gallon of windshield wiper fluid and new tires
Just to be clear, you keep buying stupid and poorly designed cars to save a couple hundred dollars on oil changes? Which are the ONLY maintenance item you need to do on any brand new ICE from purchase to about 100k miles?
You repeatedly purchase brand new, luxury priced, "new car premium" priced cars to save a few hundred dollars?
Uhhh.... What?
My ICE car's entire maintenance budget since I purchased it 5 years ago has been about $300 worth of oil changes, once per year, and Europeans claim that's way too often.
I am deep in tech, but still struggle to open a tesla door. Hiding the handles, both inside and outside, will never make sense to me.
Electric retractable door handles is such a stupid gimmick.
I once pulled over to help a stranded Model S driver with a flat tire in the Mojave desert. Every door handle had a zip tie hanging off it because they _all_ had failed present mechanisms.
Junk
Apparently non-retractable door handles have only a very minor impact on drag/efficiency: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/09/flush-door-handles-are-...
So, yes, I think you're right that they are largely just a gimmick.
If manufacturers in general were serious about improving efficiency they'd stop putting huge heavy wheels on everything, instead of chasing fractions of a percent with overcomplicated and failure-prone door handles.
Side bonus, smaller wheels with taller sidewall tires are more comfortable, less prone to damage, and the tires are cheaper and easier to replace, too!
Alloy wheels are pretty light, and the weight mostly affects acceleration.
At speed, most of your power is going to fight drag, so aerodynamics make a much bigger difference in efficiency.
Agreed. Plus the choices were never electrically actuated Vs. standard, plenty of vehicles before Tesla had flush fully mechanical doorhandles that reduced the drag coefficient.
Tesla did it to be different, futuristic, and to show off. Then plenty of other electric vehicle manufacturers copied. Even ignoring the safety issues, these things had reliability problems since almost inception and could be frozen shut in the winter.
Between the door handles, removing the turn signal stalk, removing the wiper stalk, non-round non-drive-by-wire wheel, and now putting the shifter in the ceiling, Tesla has made a lot of unforced errors to try to stand out.
> now putting the shifter in the ceiling
They what?! And people are still buying these things? This is the most valuable automaker in the world?
Because you don't need to use that shifter regularly; you shift gears on the screen in that car and they have capacitive buttons near the caution lights on the ceiling as a redundant backup.
> you shift gears on the screen in that car
You're not helping bro. I'm literally crying right now what even is this car?
their profits are pretty normal, the stock is clearly more stock in musk himself than in the car company
If you're driving in a competitive, sanctioned high-speed race, sure, fine. Save every bit of drag possible. At highway speeds in a normal-person shaped vehicle, they cannot possibly make a measurable difference.
Wouldn't that depend on the accuracy of the tool doing the measuring?
Not really. Stand in front of a car, squint, and observe the size of its silhouette. Now move slightly so that you can see the outline of the door handle, and consider its relative size compared to the rest of the car.
This isn't a perfect comparison. You could design car handles that look like little parachutes attached to something with the drag profile of a dolphin, but that's not a likely situation. In general, the area of the rest of the car is going to be many thousands of times that of the door handle. Given the difficulties in measuring, let alone modeling, turbulent air flow, it would be hard to detect a door handle's drag compared to the rest of the car.
I guess you could attach a meter to the door handle itself to detect how much drag it experiences from its own perspective, and that'd be pretty accurate. My hunch is it'd be an insignificant rounding error compared to the rest of the system.
Top-trim Ioniq 5 has flush door handles for aerodynamic efficiency. Which is more than cancelled out by the stupid 20-inch wheels. Flush door handles are the pop-up headlights of this decade: questionable aerodynamic benefit, reliability issues, and let's be honest, only done to look cool.
(Granted, they're damned nice wheels. When people compliment the car in a parking lot, they usually talk about the wheels.)
Nissan GT-R manual flush handles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK0MxfPE4N0&pp=ygUWbmlzc2FuI...
Honestly that's just as stupid. It would have similar problems in Winter, very little benefit, and has the same "How do you do it" problem
I'm old and still somewhat feel electric windows is such a gimmick. For that inevitable day when I run my car off the bridge and into some body of water, I'll be able to get out of my car when I manually roll down my window. Electric windows are a death trap!
At some point, convenience routs safety, and the consumers have spoken
You cannot open car windows under water, electric or not. The pressure jams everything up.
That's precisely why you roll down the window. Nobody suggested opening the door. Not even sure how you got there
>when I run my car off the bridge and into some body of water, I'll be able to get out of my car when I manually roll down my window.
>You cannot open car WINDOWS under water, electric or not.
>Nobody suggested opening the door. Not even sure how you got there
Uh, you aren't sure how I got there because I didn't. I never even said the word door.
You cannot roll down manual car windows in a sunken car because the pressure of the water jams the mechanism regardless of what powers that mechanism. In a still sinking car, electric windows do not short out and you can roll them down just fine.
"Tesla is looking to redesign its market strategy following trapped-investor report"
hopefully someday someone will solve door handles once and for all, but until then the tesla engineers will soldier on