Tesla is “working on” redesigning its door handles so they are less likely to trap people inside the company’s cars, chief designer Franz von Holzhausen told Bloomberg News on Wednesday.
The news comes just one day after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an probe into Tesla’s door handles, and one week after a Bloomberg News investigation highlighted multiple instances where owners or passengers were stuck in their cars following a crash.
Von Holzhausen didn’t specify when Tesla made the decision to rethink how its door handles work, according to Bloomberg. China has already been pushing automakers to reconsider the use of fully concealed door handles because of safety concerns, although the country’s top regulator has not taken a final action.
One of the two apparent problems with Tesla’s door handles has been they use electronic locks, which can stop working if they aren’t receiving power from the car’s battery system. The other is that, while Tesla does have manual door releases built into its cars, they are often hard to find and difficult 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 said it had received nine complaints from Tesla owners who experienced a failure with their door handles. In four of those cases, the safety agency said the owners had to break a window “to regain entry into the vehicle.”
Tesla includes instructions in its owner’s manuals that describe how to use an outside power source to activate dead electronic door locks, as both NHTSA and Bloomberg have noted. But NHTSA noted in its preliminary report that none of the owners who contacted the agency reported seeing low-voltage battery warnings — meaning they likely would not have known what was causing the problem.
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