Tesla CEO Elon Musk has already done plenty to cause reasonable people to write off the entire company forever, but its vehicles also have plenty of issues on their own. MotorTrend lived with the Model Y for two years and absolutely hated it, while the Cybertruck's been recalled eight times, including one recall over body panels that kept flying off. And, of course, you can't forget the confusing shifter issues that may have contributed to Angela Chao's death. The good news is, though, Tesla might actually fix one of its worst door handle designs, Bloomberg reports.
In an interview on Bloomberg's Hot Pursuit! podcast, Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla's head of design, said future Teslas will likely combine the manual and electronic door releases instead of placing them in different locations. In theory, at least, the new design would make it easier for someone to open their door in "a panic situation." So that's nice. "The idea of combining the electronic one and the manual one together into one button, I think, makes a lot of sense," von Holzhausen said on the podcast. "That's something that we're working on."
Of course, this is Tesla we're talking about, so you have to take anything anyone who works there says with a grain of salt so large, you could stick a light bulb in there and turn it into a lamp. For all we know, Elon could nix the new design before it makes it into production, or it could have new, horrible usability issues. But at least Franz is saying something that's encouraging to hear.
Tesla
Unfortunately for everyone who hates Tesla's exterior door handles, those probably aren't going anywhere anytime soon unless the government forces them to make a change. Then again, while the exterior door handle design is annoying, it isn't usually a safety issue. So while it would be great for Tesla to kill two birds with one stone here, we aren't going to get too mad at them for potentially fixing a design issue that could kill you first.
The potential safety issues with Tesla's interior door release design aren't just theoretical, either. Back in 2019, one lawsuit blamed the door handles for the death of a Model S owner who was unable to escape his burning Model S. More recently, a Bloomberg investigation found a slew of incidents where people inside a Tesla were injured or killed when they couldn't open their doors after their cars lost power.
Meanwhile, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has received at least 140 complaints about Tesla's doors, and just this week, NHTSA opened an investigation into the Tesla Model Y's door handles that will, thankfully, look into claims the exterior door handles occasionally fail, as well as "assess the approach used by Tesla to supply power to the door locks and the reliability of the applicable power supplies." What will come of that investigation, though, still isn't clear. But you know, no one's going to complain about their car getting less deadly door handles.
