Tesla is redesigning its door handles following safety probe, Bloomberg investigation

Tesla is “working on” redesigning its doorway handles truthful they are little apt to trap radical wrong the company’s cars, main decorator Franz von Holzhausen told Bloomberg News connected Wednesday.

The quality comes conscionable 1 time aft the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an probe into Tesla’s doorway handles, and 1 week aft a Bloomberg News probe highlighted aggregate instances wherever owners oregon passengers were stuck successful their cars pursuing a crash.

Von Holzhausen didn’t specify erstwhile Tesla made the determination to rethink however its doorway handles work, according to Bloomberg. China has already been pushing automakers to reconsider the usage of afloat concealed doorway handles due to the fact that of information concerns, though the country’s apical regulator has not taken a last action.

One of the 2 evident problems with Tesla’s doorway handles has been they usage physics locks, which tin halt moving if they aren’t receiving powerfulness from the car’s artillery system. The different is that, portion Tesla does person manual doorway releases built into its cars, they are often hard to find and hard to access.

“The thought of combining the physics 1 and the manual 1 unneurotic into 1 button, I think, makes a batch of sense,” von Holzhausen told Bloomberg. “That’s thing that we’re moving on.”

NHTSA opened its probe connected Tuesday aft the bureau said it had received 9 complaints from Tesla owners who experienced a nonaccomplishment with their doorway handles. In 4 of those cases, the information bureau said the owners had to interruption a model “to regain introduction into the vehicle.”

Tesla includes instructions successful its owner’s manuals that picture however to usage an extracurricular powerfulness root to activate dormant physics doorway locks, arsenic some NHTSA and Bloomberg person noted. But NHTSA noted successful its preliminary study that nary of the owners who contacted the bureau reported seeing low-voltage artillery warnings — meaning they apt would not person known what was causing the problem.