The Electric Door Tesla Made Famous Is Now a Danger in Other Cars

Elon Musk wanted Tesla Inc.’s electric door handles to embody the future — sleek, seamless and emblematic of the cool he envisioned plug-in cars would come to personify.

He succeeded: In just over a decade, handles that function at a touch have become hallmarks of modern automotive design, replicated from Detroit to Shenzhen as automakers raced to borrow Tesla’s aesthetic.

Now some drivers and industry analysts say this much-imitated style is proving to be a safety hazard. Electric doors are locking people out of their cars or — even worse — making it harder for them to exit, even after a crash. In some cases, the outcome has been deadly.

Complaints to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) about the doors — across all car models — jumped 65% in 2024 from the prior year. Among 520 complaints about electric handles and doors that were filed with federal regulators over the last decade, there were numerous allegations of pets and kids being trapped inside a car after a loss of power.

Tesla has drawn the most complaints, and the automaker is now the subject of a US safety investigation into the dangers associated with its doors. Regulators announced the probe in September, shortly after a Bloomberg News investigation into fatal incidents involving Tesla’s doors.

But drivers have complained to the government about other carmakers as well.

In one complaint, an owner alleged that the battery and doors of a Fisker Ocean failed in a grocery store parking lot, trapping the driver as well as the driver’s elderly mother and young son inside for two hours. In another, a driver with mobility issues due to a “bad leg” described crawling through the back cargo space of a 2024 Lexus SUV to escape after the doors wouldn’t open, causing enough pain that the owner ended up in a hospital emergency room. The owner of a Ford Mustang Mach-E alleged being stuck outside the parked car — along with the driver’s brother, nephew and two dogs — stranded three hours from home. 

Now, regulators in China and Europe say they may impose new rules on the doors, to ensure drivers and passengers always have a way to escape. Several automakers — including Tesla and electric rival Rivian Automotive Inc. — are redesigning how the handles or their manual backups work. 

“We’re continuing to look at, is there a better way?” Robyn Denholm, the chair of Tesla’s board, said in an interview. One possibility under consideration, she said: programming the locks to open automatically when the battery’s voltage is low. 

Safety advocates say the US government should update its own standards if the entire auto industry doesn’t find ways to make the doors and their handles more reliable.

“Safety has to be built in,” said Jake Fisher, senior director for auto testing at Consumer Reports, who considers electric doors a dangerous, unnecessary innovation. “If you’re going to change something, it has to be intuitive to potentially prevent a catastrophic problem.”

There are 274 million registered cars and trucks in the US. Versions of electric-door technology now grace about 70 models in the country, according to an analysis by Bloomberg and Consumer Reports. Those include EVs like Rivian’s pickup trucks and gas-burners such as several Range Rover SUVs. Often, the exterior handles lie flush with the door when not in use, while others employ handles that look mechanical but operate at the touch of a finger. Interior controls can be as simple as a button to push.  

To designers, their appeal is not just cosmetic — they’re relatively cheap, requiring few moving parts, and can reduce air drag on a vehicle. But they can also malfunction, or simply stop working if the battery powering them dies. Aware of the risk, automakers have installed manual, back-up door releases. But those are often hard to find — tucked under floor mats or behind panels. In a crash or other emergency, drivers and passengers may struggle to locate them in time.

“They’re pretty much hidden,” said Janette Fennell, president of Kids and Car Safety, a nonprofit that promotes policies to keep children and pets from being trapped in vehicles. “We have seen situations where people have panicked, and they really don’t know what to do. Think of a car fire. You need to know how to get out quickly.”

The issue has dogged Tesla for years. The families of two college students who died after a 2024 Cybertruck crash near San Francisco sued the company in October, alleging “catastrophic design defects” in its doors trapped their children inside the burning wreck.

A Bloomberg investigation into Tesla earlier this year explored several incidents in which people were injured or died after serious crashes where first responders and bystanders struggled to open the doors. The NHTSA in September disclosed an investigation into the electric doors of more than 174,000 Tesla Model Y SUVs.

Federal regulators have received 210 door complaints concerning Tesla in the last 10 years, according to Bloomberg’s analysis, and 310 electric-door complaints involving other automakers. Many drivers reported being locked out of their cars, or locked in. 

Another 60 drivers — including owners of Teslas as well as competing brands — filed complaints that questioned the safety of electric-door designs but did not report experiencing a malfunction. Some even criticized the federal government for allowing such cars to be sold.

“It’s definitely going to be a growing customer concern,” said Frank Hanley, senior director of auto benchmarking for J.D. Power, who oversees the market researcher’s closely watched Initial Quality Study. “We see, year over year in our data, that customers are saying they’re more difficult to use.”

Federal regulators don’t have specific rules for electric door controls. But they have used existing regulations — aimed at ensuring safe entry and exit from vehicles — to investigate and compel automakers to recall some power door systems. Before NHTSA opened its Tesla investigation, for example, questions from the agency prompted Ford Motor Co. and Fisker Inc. to recall EVs to fix defects related to their doors. The agency declined to comment for this story. 

As a fail-safe, automakers pair their interior handles or buttons with manual releases that open doors in an emergency. But drivers and passengers must know where they are. In various Tesla models, manual releases in the back seat sit behind speaker grilles, door pockets and beneath carpets. In Rivian’s 2025 and 2026 pickup trucks and SUVs, the manual release cable in the rear seat is tucked behind a door panel that must be removed.

The locations of backup controls can be found in a car’s owner manual. But drivers in an emergency don’t have time to flip through a manual, safety advocates say. And many automakers have ditched paper manuals altogether, relying instead on the vehicle’s dashboard information system — which won’t work if the power dies. 

So some automakers are starting to rethink both the electric handles and their manual backups. Bloomberg reached out to every ongoing company whose doors received a NHTSA complaint, asking whether they were considering any design changes. Among those who responded, some said they were constantly evaluating ways to improve safety, while others cited specific changes. 

Startup Fisker, whose cars were the subject of numerous complaints, declared bankruptcy last year and has ceased operations. Hyundai Motor Co. objected to characterizing its doors or handles as electric, saying the latching mechanism remains mechanical. However, the exterior door handles on its electric models extend and retract using electricity during normal operation. If the battery is drained, they can still be opened by pressing one end inward and inserting a physical key. Similarly, Kia Corp., a Hyundai affiliate, describes its door opening systems as mechanical rather than electric, even though some of its cars feature door handles that extend and retract with electricity.

Rivian now plans to incorporate a manual release that is more clearly visible and located near the electrically powered interior handles in the rear doors of its next-generation SUV, people familiar with the change told Bloomberg. Tesla’s chief designer revealed in September that the company is redesigning its door handles to make the manual release mechanism more intuitive.

Several companies, meanwhile, have combined electric and manual systems into the same handle. Ford’s Mustang Mach-E, the BMW iX3, and some Cadillac and Lexus models have two-in-one interior door handles that operate electronically with a slight tug or manually with a harder yank — or in the case of Lexus, by pulling rather than pushing the handle. A BMW spokesperson said the design made sense because if a door fails to open during an emergency, the driver’s natural reaction will be to pull harder. 

Lucid Group Inc. also uses that type of handle on its luxury electric cars. Senior manager of interior design Zeb Coughenour said he was convinced of its necessity after hearing of a Texas man and his dog who police said died of heat exposure inside a Corvette after being unable to find the e-door’s manual release. 

“A cable under the map pocket would potentially save money,” Coughenour said. “But that user experience doesn’t resonate with safety — with me or a user in a panicked situation.”

General Motors Co. has since made the Corvette door’s emergency release handle more visible, the company said. Graphics on the handle, which lies on the floor next to the door, illustrate its function. GM also has added a “bystander access” feature on its e-doors to unlock them after a crash, so first responders or good Samaritans can free the occupants.

Stellantis NV engineered a similar system on Jeep and Dodge models with electric doors, where airbag deployment automatically unlocks all doors. Stellantis and Ford also have outfitted their electric doors with supercapacitors that act as a battery backup to keep the power flowing to the latches even when a car’s 12-volt battery has died. And Ford, in response to this year’s recall, updated the software on its Mach-E to keep electricity flowing to door handles for 12 minutes after the small battery that normally supplies them — separate from the electric car’s main battery pack — goes dead. 

Many safety advocates favor a two-in-one door handle design, considering it the most intuitive option. They say the federal government should impose standards on electric door handles if problems persist.

China is already moving in that direction. Regulators there are weighing new rules that would eliminate recessed or hidden handles, following a series of deadly accidents. And in October, European car-safety regulators said they would shore up rules to ensure that occupants can safely exit vehicles after a crash, calling it a “key priority.” 

“If the auto industry does not react to this, they may wind up having to have something much more prescriptive,” said Fisher, at Consumer Reports.

He notes that consumers weren’t exactly clamoring for electric door handles in the first place. Instead, it was an innovation the car companies pursued on their own — one that, in his opinion, hasn’t made cars better. At a bare minimum, they need to be safe.

“How is this an improvement?” Fisher said. “I am not aware of consumers who find it too difficult to pull on a latch.”

— with assistance from David Welch, Edward Ludlow and Keith Laing