Tesla’s design boss promises that the new door handles will be more intuitive for occupants during “a panic situation”
After years of treating electric door handles as a design triumph, Tesla now finds itself redesigning them for a less glamorous reason: people, including children, keep getting stuck inside its cars. The company has admitted that a new generation of door handles is in development, prompted by repeated cases of entrapment in Tesla EVs. Adding to the urgency is an active NHTSA investigation, which has only piled on the pressure.
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Franz von Holzhausen, Chief Designer at Tesla, acknowledged that his team is looking into the issue, explaining that the new door handles will be more intuitive during “a panic situation”. The proposed solution is to merge the electronic and mechanical door-release mechanisms. These are currently separate, and their locations differ depending on the model and year, making them harder to find in an emergency.
Rethinking the Release
Speaking on Bloomberg’s Hot Pursuit podcast, Holzhausen said: “The idea of combining the electronic one and the manual one together into one button, I think, makes a lot of sense. That’s something that we’re working on.”
The concern arises from situations where Tesla door handles can fail if the low-voltage battery loses power. This is not a problem exclusive to Tesla, with other automakers like Ford having issued software updates to provide clearer “low power” warnings to the driver.
Complaints and Consequences
According to Bloomberg, the NHTSA has logged more than 140 consumer complaints about faulty Tesla doors since 2018. Some incidents have been severe, with injuries and even fatalities linked to occupants being unable to exit their vehicles after an accident.
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Nine of these cases involved parents trying to open the rear doors of a Tesla Model Y to reach their children. In four of those instances, parents resorted to smashing their own windows to get inside, as the kids were too young to operate the hidden manual release.
Pressure from China
Meanwhile, China is considering new rules through the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology that could outlaw flush door handles and mandate a mechanical backup on all cars. Holzhausen said Tesla is ready to adapt, describing the forthcoming solution as “really good.”
For now, Tesla has not said when the redesigned handles will arrive, nor whether the update could be retrofitted to cars already on the road.
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Thanos Pappas, a product design engineer by trade, has been wading through automotive journalism for… Read full bio

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