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.
Hmm, good question. In this context, I guess "continues to work after the EMP"?
Do you expect a mechanical wave to come with the EMP or it originates in space?
This is clearly not the case with Tesla.
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
So, yes, I think you're right that they are largely just a gimmick.
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!
At speed, most of your power is going to fight drag, so aerodynamics make a much bigger difference in efficiency.
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.
They what?! And people are still buying these things? This is the most valuable automaker in the world?
You're not helping bro. I'm literally crying right now what even is this 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK0MxfPE4N0&pp=ygUWbmlzc2FuI...
(Granted, they're damned nice wheels. When people compliment the car in a parking lot, they usually talk about the wheels.)
At some point, convenience routs safety, and the consumers have spoken
>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.
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’d say these are grounds for removing them from the rideshare circulation until a user has completed a brief safety course.
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.
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 allow these dumb door handles…
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.
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.
Are you talking about motorcycles?? Yeah nobody thinks motorcycles are safe. But the issues with them are inherent to the form, not created by the design.
To be clear, i also think motorcycles should be regulated better. The tiny signal lights on a honda cbr are obviously a creation of valuing design over safety.
> Just let manufacturers innovate...
We did. They innovated door handles that depend on the car electronics functioning, headlights that blind other drivers, and monthly subscriptions to unlock heated seats.
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.
That nobody stopped them means they got away with it, which means no motivation to change culture. And the circle jerk goes ‘round and round.
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.
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...
If any, Chinese cars are usually loaded with bells and whistles to the top.
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.
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"
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.
More important is lessening wind resistance and noise. Tesla windows seal tightly against the moulding and they need to be lowered about a centimeter before opening or closing the door. The electronic latches do this automatically.
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.
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.
"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."
My Subaru may not be able to change lanes but it also won't run straight into a truck, police car, ambulance, tree, or wall like a Tesla will.
I think laws are usually reactive. Why would there be a ban on such a silly thing.
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.
Clearly rear emergency egress is not a requirement, a child opening the door while going down the highway is a much larger risk.
... 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.
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.
There are many ways to do a fold flush manual handle/lever and hook that up to a traditional door mechanism.
I'm just relating to the infeasable task of proactively banning permutations of silly designs.
I think escaping the 747 is , thankfully for those who fly , easier.
Just so stupid, how many unnecessary deaths in Teslas have there been because of the overengineered crap door handles? Really tragic and pointless.
I don't have sympathy for those who DWI. Luckily, she didn't kill anyone else.
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.
I retract my claim.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://carnewschina.com/2025/09/05/chinas-auto-regulators-e...
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).
But we did it anyway, because a) I believe the engineering philosophy "if it's not tested it doesn't work," is especially pertinent for safety critical systems; and b) my friend told me of a couple of youths who had died just a couple days earlier in a burning Tesla because the electronics shut down and they could not figure out the alternate release mechanism.
Then he said, "Welp, enjoy your new car!" and drove away in his Tesla.
PaulHoule•11h ago