Tesla “works” by redesigning the door handles so that they are less likely to trap people in the company’s cars, head of designer Franz von Holzhausen I told Bloomberg News Wednesday.
The news comes just a day after the Spring of the National Road Traffic Safety Service (NHTSA) on the Tesla door handles and a week after a Bloomberg News survey highlighted multiple cases where owners or passengers had stuck in their cars after crash.
Von Holzhausen did not specify when Tesla decided to rethink how his doors work, according to Bloomberg. China has already pressed the automakers to review the use of fully hidden door handles due to security concerns, although the country’s leading regulator has not taken final action.
One of the two obvious problems with Tesla door handles uses electronic locks, which can stop working if they do not get power from the car’s battery system. The other is that while Tesla has manual door releases integrated into his cars, it is often difficult to find and are difficult to access.
“The idea of combining the electronic and manual together in a button, I think, makes sense,” Von Holzhausen told Bloomberg. “This is something we are working on.”
NHTSA opened its investigation on Tuesday after the organization said it had received nine complaints from Tesla owners who had failed with their door handles. In four of these cases, the security service said the owners had to break a window “to regain the entry into the vehicle”.
Tesla includes instructions on the manuals of its owner describing how to use an external source of energy to activate dead door electronic locks, as both NHTSA and Bloomberg have noted. However, NHTSA noted in his preliminary report that none of the owners who contacted the organization said he saw low voltage battery warnings-which means that they would probably have not known what caused the problem.
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