New Rules Could Force Tesla to Redesign Its Door Handles. That’s Harder Than It Sounds
New Rules Could Force Tesla to Redesign Its Door Handles. That’s Harder Than It Sounds
Tesla disregarded all knowledge about automotive door safety to make a more expensive and much more dangerous door handle.
This is what libertarians do for literally everything.
Libertarians are just people too dumb to understand code requirements in every industry and profession.
The only thing libertarians understand is that they can make more money if they charge a full price for a half-ass job.
Hyperloop!
As a libertarian, that's just not true. Elon Musk isn't a libertarian either, he's just an opportunist.
The libertarian solution to things like regulations is court precedent. Setting that precedent should be the job of the attorney general and a jury, and the legislature should only make broad laws.
This hopefully cuts down on government corruption since it's theoretically harder to buy off a jury than legislators.
Did you just take a complete left turn into politics land?
Audi is following in all their new models...
🤮
"That's harder than it sounds."
Is it, though? Is it really? We've been making manual car door latches for 100 years.
It's only hard for Musk, and only because he just doesn't want to do it.
Seriously. Every other car maker has figured out how to make normal door handles. You can even buy the parts directly from them if you find it too hard to design yourself.
The point is that the entire passenger entry system has been designed around electronic door handles. So you might think it's as simple as just swapping them for mechanical ones but it's not.
The handles are really just buttons. Requests to a computer. The "locks" are just a binary state of the entry system that determines if conditions are satisfied to release the mechanical latch when the request is made.
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Again, what did they miss? Spell it out for us, please!
Opel Corsa 1993 presents:
Flat aerodynamic door handles.
Unless you're planning to drive your car around at about 150 miles per hour I don't imagine that the aerodynamicism of door handles really comes into account. Especially since you've still got wing mirrors, wipers, and aerials on the car.
It comes into play much sooner than that when you're designing for maximum range on an electric vehicle.
I looked into this a long time ago, and it was likely they were getting around 2-3 miles of extra range from it.
I'd say it's less important now than it was back then, when batteries weren't as good and a mile or two anywhere was important.
With two doors, half the problem is already solved!
that style is also a problem in the winter, though less so
they are prone to breaking as they age when the door is frozen shut and you gotta pull hard
I read the article. It sounds like the auto makers concern is that they don't think they have been given enough time to solve the problem (the problem being one which may kill people while we wait for a solution).
I think we should give them all the time they want, as long as they stop selling cars without safe door handles RIGHT NOW.
Your comment is giga based because it doesn't let the overton window get shifted by being too suggestible.
Your brain still went where logic goes, not where was suggested. So important at times like this.
All in all, quality
“We meed more time even though door handles are a solved problem.”
The issues could cascade beyond the design. The auto manufacturing industry operates on strict production schedules. Though it builds in time to validate and test whatever new features come in each new model, the sudden intro of a design change late in the process could throw off the delicate timetable.
FFS, it's a bloody door handle, not full self driving tech. Author is full of BS.
A lot of upvotes here, and I think they're ignoring how much is involved in production pipelines and the overhead of sourcing suppliers. That said, Musk has a habit of throwing in last minute changes and the company manages to handle those but much like self driving they ship late
Yeah let's see, if the handle would have to be a different shape, they may need a different cutout for the door, different handle moulds, different mechanical parts, updated electronics... does anyone have a fucking clue how difficult it is to program one of those robotic arms? How expensive new moulds are? Any other potential knock-on effects this may have on the internal design?
People with the mentality of 'it's just a small plug at the bottom of the pool, how bad could it possibly be if we removed it'
You do not know or believe how much shit has to be pipelined to get a simple change on a car design going on the market. If you have knowledge about computers, you quickly notice that the hardware and software running in a car are OLD. I've seen cars sold as new with processors so old, they are "no longer recommended for new designs". This is because every single thing has to be tested and approved to death in a car. Sometimes several times over.
Government's also tend to introduce grace periods. They announced that they are going to introduce a law and that that law will go into effect on x date. The manufacturing now has plenty of time to sell the current run of vehicles and then alter the design well ahead of the law coming into effect.
You don't just introduce a law and then implement it the following day. Well Trump does but no body else does.
Great. Next please: no more touch-controls. I want back haptic buttons for the most important stuff.
EDIT: Instead of silly downvotes, an opinion on why touchscreens/-buttons are superior would be preferable. I'm curious.
Touchscreens are infinitely reconfigurable. And the solution is cheaper. Some like the cleaner look when avoiding all the buttons and knobs.
Sure, for anything else than a car. But I don't want to have to look at it while driving 250km/h, I want to feel if I have the right button and also pressed it. Pure safety.
Everywhere else I'd surely prefer a touchscreen over haptic buttons. I mean I have through this great tech-evolution, I love it. But it all has its place, and the car doesn't seem like the right place for it. At least not for everything.
Your delight ends where my safety begins. Taking your eyes off the road to operate your vehicle is a dangerous thing.
I’m calling corpo lobbied bullshit. 2 years is enough time to put a normal door handle on your car.
they got lazy, they fully adopted the electronic one, and dint want to "waste money" bringing back the old one, in thier recent and future models.
Cars are designed up to 5 years in advance. Usually the last 2 years before production is dedicated to endurance testing.
They’re not being expected to design a whole new car from scratch though, are they.
Tesla doesn't do any of that, nor crash testing
So how do they deal with routine and unexpected defects that every manufacturer deals with for every model?
They don't have to redesign an entire car, just the internal parts of a door that are related to a handle, that in the past they made work mechanically btw, so no, 2 years is more than enough to redesign and start implementing it
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Redesigning the handle by 2027 is stupid easy. I have an masters in mechanical engineering, this could be done with mostly off the shelf parts. Tesla is being a removed like normal.
I read the article, and I’m calling bullshit on the excuses they’re putting up. The fact that they usually prefer a five year cycle, does not mean that it’s difficult to change the handles on the doors in two years if you need to.
Is this because the door handle is some complicated electronic mechanism rather than a latch? Gee who could have possibly predicted that would be a problem.
My neighbour has a Tesla and last year I had great fun watching her trying to defrost her car enough to get the door handle to even come out.
I have had to put quite a bit of force into a car door to get it to open on many an occasion. (Ice is a removed) A normal door handle just works, stop trying to fix it!
If the door handle is frozen, the whole car is probably frozen.
I think it's mostly because of this: https://evseekers.com/why-do-tesla-windows-go-down-when-opening-door/ (Looks like AI slop but it does explain what I think it's needed for)
Many modern car doors do not have a frame around the top of the window. So to not damage the window or seal in the door frame, they temporary lower it a bit using electricity. I'm sure Tesla would be incompetent enough to make it so there's no decent way to do it without this feature.
Load of uninformed B.S. from the supply chain expert. There’s not a door out there that isn’t full of empty space.
Bus door
Points! :-)
harder than it sounds... yeah the technology isn't there yet! we need research and scientific breakthrough to invent a door handle that you can actually handle. no one's even thought of the concept before.
I can't wait for elon musk to invent the door handle. I hope it's another display
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i very much did, actually. it's just the bullshit recycled from the seatbelt mandate, except this is about something cars already had a century ago.
You've posted this in multiple places without explaining yourself, and your subsequent follow-ups have also just been questioning the person's credentials and offering nothing of your own. You're a classic example of the bullshit asymmetry principle, flooding the thread with low effort trolling.
Do go on
I hate fucking "flush handles". Good riddance to terrible garbage.
I find them cool. But if they become unusable in freezing weather or kill people because of an overcomplex emergency release from the inside?...
They're like an idea a twelve year old Steve Jobs / Jony Ive wannabe would come up with.
I knew. A guy with a fully shaved mr2 (yes that means no door handles). Doors opened with a remote to operate the latch. He also had a cable run down under the side skirt, so if it failed you could manually pull the cable to get the door oprn. This was put together by a 24 year old in school, not some "genius"
I had a 1989 Ford Probe without a handle that stuck out like a typical car. It was recessed instead.
Better for fuel efficiency, which was also the intention of these stupid flush mount ones Tesla has been fawning over. But these were still manual door handles designed 40ish years ago...
At least they work as a quick visual cue that a car is designed with zero utilitarians in the room
Cry me a river.
Big government is oppressing small businesses again! Thanks Obama!
Could they just use regular fucking door handles?
I remember when people kept trying to assert that Tesla is a "luxury" brand, though it seems that this pretense has finally been dropped. Even so, surely they can figure out something that doesn't seem to be an issue for even the cheapest tier of vehicles available in USDM.
They can, it's an article out of the air.
The problem is this bullshit was allowed on the road in the first place.
Will it? I’m skeptical of the translation since it’s obviously loose and casual, and more optimistic with the quote from Tesla saying they’re redesigning it …
Whatever. Luxury e-cars are the new Bimmers.
They wish. My 30 year old $2500 bmw e36 was nicer inside than the last model 3 I had the misfortune of sitting in, and was the most reliable car I've owned. Straight 6 And 5 speed, beaten and slid daily until I sold it with 200k miles. My biggest problem with that car was keeping back tires on it. Man some days I wish I never sold that car.... Moved north and a slammed 2wd car isn't gonna get me to work over the mountain pass in the winter. Now I drive a POS 2012 Subaru with fried oil control rings. If the bimmer had a LSD I probably would still be driving it 🤬
Nah, BMWs were actually pretty great, for a time. Well put-together, fairly reliable, engaging to drive, very comfortable, pleasantly designed.
I daily drive a 2003 E39 5 series with 260,000 miles on the clock. Mechanically it's great.
I did have to sort some rust out a while back, but that's par for the course in the UK. Salted roads, never far from the sea, constantly damp roads spraying all that salty road grime under the car. For the love of god people, rust protect your cars.
I've been telling people to look for a shop that can do a wax film coat when they do the oil change. Super simple job when the car is already on the lift.
I'm saying so rather sarcastically because where I live, e-cars, especially BYDs and Teeeeezlus, are becoming status symbols for people with fuck-you money.
Like zim zimma? That kind of bimma?
Who cares? You only have yourself to blame for buying a Tesla.
Dude, you act like you've never been burned by someone in your life. Instead of shaming people for purchasing something and getting burned, we should all be getting together and shaming the companies that are enshitified.
Wtf is "willingness to work from design-first principles"? Do Wired realize that the form of the handle follows the function of designing for better aerodynamics?
Pretty sure they're using "design" to mean "aesthetics" in that sentence. I do think we need to less often use "design" to refer specifically to aesthetics or graphic design; every object and system that humans have made are designed.
Inside or outside? Ik they have issue with inside door handles and safety but I don't see a need to redesign outside handles?
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-dangerous-doors/
Non-functional outside handles are just as bad as non-functional inside ones. Not always is the person on the inside able to open the door on their own.
As long as the model 3/y were mechanically operated, I'm not sure their push to pull mechanism is bad or a problem, but the model s/x have electronically presenting handles that need power to present themselves as they pop out horizontally, not with a hinge like 3/y, and you can't really just make that mechanical like you can the model 3/y ones, and the CyberTruck doesn't even have exterior handles.
I love that this happens after little removed Elon does Trumps bidding. Almost like that’s literally never worked out well for anyone.
Elon is still helping Trump and pushing Nazis in Europe. He just had a fake fight and less in public eye to help his stock.
A regulation in China isn’t going to change that.
Oh cool, we should start looking into shit that matters.
There are billions of us. We can do many things at once.
This may not matter as much as nuclear disarmament, but it matters to everyone that owns one of these cars.
Being able to quickly get out of a burning car is important. If you only ever use the electronic door handle and your electrical system is damaged by...the fire, then you are much more likely to burn. The same problem exists on the outside of the car as rescuers have a harder time getting in to save people.
Getting stuck outside of the car in the winter is also pretty common when there is not a good place to grab when the door is covered in ice.
Car manufacturers have been making normal door handles for forever. Tesla 'fixed' something that wasn't broken.
After renting a couple cars with electronic door poppers, I find them plainly worse than mechanical door latches. They're a solution in search of a problem, and some implementations are hazardous.
I think having an electric popper on top of an mechanical door latch (actual door handles are standard mechanic, but there's solenoid that can actuate them independently) is okay if you can find an actual usecase.
I mean sure still stupid but at least it isn't dangerous.
Same way electric locks have worked for the past 30 years on cars.
An old civic might be able to unlock from a key fob, but that's only an electronically controlled solenoid controlling a lock which is mechanical in nature, and who's main user-accessible interaction point is mechanically linked to the lock.
The problem with having both is that the electronic one is always the primary one, and the one people will use daily. In particular Tesla hides the mechanical ones really well. So in an emergency situation, people panic and have no idea where it is or how to use it.
Electric locks actually serve a purpose though. And they're not a danger to passengers inside. What purpose do electric door handles serve? Other than being more prone to failure, more expensive, and dangerous?
They were hazardous when they were on Corvettes too. They should have banned them back then.
The rental cars in question were, in fact Corvettes. Corvettes are still using them.
I hear they are a solution to the problem of increasing mileage/efficiency. I am no fan of Tesla, but we have to admit, there is some merit to that argument, however debatable the efficiency benefits are.
That's not to say safety isn't a serious issue. The biggest problem is the reliance on electronics. Now if someone can reinvent the design with a highly reliable mechanical system, with multiple redundancy.
To my knowledge, there are designs which allow you to pop out the latch without the need for electronics.
However, if I'm reading the article correctly those wouldn't be allowed either because in their default state they don't have "enough room for a hand to grip behind them". That wording alone explicitely bans flush doorhandles, and not just electronic doorhandles
Yeah I'm sorry, I'll take normal door handles over a 0.01% increase in efficiency
I've seen three designs for purely mechanical flush door handles in production use:
The push-then-pull central hinge is probably not a great choice for the application because its operation will be less obvious to a rescuer trying to get the door open quickly. It's still better than something that requires electronics.
im occasional ride in my parents leased ioniq5 and the door handles are lik teslas, very flimsy to the feel.