In September, Tesla admitted it had made a mistake designing its hidden door handles and confirmed its plan to make changes.
Longtime Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen told news services on Sept. 17 that Tesla is looking to combine its electronic and manual door-release mechanisms in an effort to make the handles more intuitive for occupants “in a panic situation.”
Recent Tesla lawsuits
- A Cybertruck crash killed three people in Piedmont, Calif., in 2024. The lawsuit alleges a design flaw in the vehicle’s door handles trapped occupants inside as the vehicle caught fire.
- Tesla is being sued over claims related to its Full Self-Driving feature. Plaintiffs allege the company misled customers about the capabilities of the technology.
- A Florida jury awarded a family $243 million in damages over a 2019 crash involving the Tesla Autopilot. Tesla is appealing.
Von Holzhausen’s comments came less than 24 hours after the National Highway Traffic Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into the door-handle mechanism on about 174,000 Tesla Model Ys from the 2021 model year.
The NHTSA stated that it is in the second phase of its three-step process to issue a recall for the popular Tesla Model Y due to an electrical issue that could cause the door handle to fail.
This week, a family in Wisconsin sued Tesla over the design of its door handles.
Tesla’s door-handle design is under heavy scrutiny.
Image source: San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Wisconsin family sues Tesla, says faulty door handle led to wrongful deaths
Five people died in Verona, Wisconsin, nearly a year ago, after the Tesla Model S they were driving crashed into a tree.
Jeffrey Bauer, 54, and Michelle Bauer, 55, were passengers in the vehicle, and their children claim a design flaw caused them to be trapped, preventing them from opening the vehicle’s doors after the Tesla crashed.
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According to the lawsuit, a fire in the car’s lithium-ion battery pack caused the electronic door systems to fail. The plaintiffs argue that Tesla was aware of this potential risk based on earlier fires, but has failed to implement the changes von Holzhausen suggested in September.
The lawsuit, filed in Dane County Circuit Court by the Bauers’ children, said that passengers in the rear were particularly vulnerable following the crash.
A nearby homeowner told 911 she heard screaming coming from the vehicle as “Tesla’s design choices created a highly foreseeable risk: that occupants who survived a crash would remain trapped inside a burning vehicle,” the complaint says.
The Bauers died the day following the crash.
Tesla door handles face NHTSA scrutiny
Tesla door handles can fail from the inside, but the NHTSA probe will examine the mechanism from the outside as well.
The NHTSA said it is investigating the Tesla door handles after receiving reports of parents being unable to open the doors of their vehicles with children trapped inside.
Related: Tesla Model Y issue put children in danger, leading to new NHTSA probe
“The most commonly reported scenarios involved parents exiting the vehicle after a drive cycle in order to remove a child from the back seat or placing a child in the back seat before starting a drive cycle. In those events, the parents were unable to reopen a door to regain access to the vehicle,” the NHTSA said.
The NHTSA has received over 140 consumer complaints about doors on various Tesla models getting stuck, not opening, or malfunctioning since 2018.
At least four parents in the NHTSA investigation were forced to break the vehicle’s back window to access it.
The NHTSA says its initial review suggests that the issue appears to arise when the electronic door locks don’t receive enough voltage from the vehicle.
The agency reports that repair invoices indicate the affected vehicles had their low-voltage batteries replaced after the incidents. Still, none of the owners reported seeing a low-voltage battery warning before the door handles failed.
In September, Bloomberg reported on how dangerous Tesla’s fully concealed door handles could be if the vehicle lost power after a crash.
“Tesla engineers went wildly in the direction of automation and overlooked what happens to the human body after a crash,” Charles Mauro, founder of Mauro Usability Science, a New York consulting firm that specializes in human factors engineering, told Bloomberg.
“Musk’s idea is a computer on wheels, but the design of the door locks was overlooked.”
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