Tesla Redesigning Its Door Handles Following Safety Probe, Bloomberg Investigation

Tesla is "working on" redesigning its door handles to make them less likely to trap people inside the company's cars, according to Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen, who spoke with Bloomberg News on Wednesday.

This announcement comes just a day after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) launched an investigation into Tesla's door handles and one week after a Bloomberg News investigation revealed several instances where owners or passengers became trapped in their cars following crashes.

Von Holzhausen did not specify precisely when Tesla decided to redesign its door handles. Still, he noted that China has already been urging automakers to rethink the use of fully concealed door handles due to safety concerns. However, the country's top regulatory authority has yet to take any final action.

One of the main issues with Tesla's door handles is that they use electronic locks, which can fail if they are not receiving power from the car's battery system. Additionally, while Tesla vehicles do have manual door releases, they are often challenging to locate and hard to access.

"The idea of combining the electronic one and the manual one together into one button, I think, makes a lot of sense," von Holzhausen told Bloomberg. "That's something that we're working on."

NHTSA opened its investigation on Tuesday after the agency received nine complaints from Tesla owners about failures with their door handles. In four of these cases, the safety agency reported that owners had to break a window to regain entry into their vehicles.

Tesla includes instructions in its owner's manuals on how to use an external power source to activate dead electronic locks, as noted by both NHTSA and Bloomberg. However, NHTSA's preliminary report revealed that none of the owners who contacted the agency reported receiving low-voltage battery warnings, indicating they likely were unaware of the issue causing the problem.