Tesla’s Dangerous Door Design Can Trap People Inside

Under Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, Tesla has built its reputation — and much of its trillion-dollar market value — on pathbreaking design, engineering excellence and an exceptional safety record. The company posted recently on X: “If you love them, put them in a Tesla.”

But whereas Teslas fare well in government-administered crash tests, certain hallmarks of its vehicles — flush door handles, electrical power, mechanical releases — are flummoxing occupants and first responders. This can turn moments after crashes into deadly races against time.

Bloomberg's Craig Trudell reports.

Under Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, Tesla has built its reputation — and much of its trillion-dollar market value — on pathbreaking design, engineering excellence and an exceptional safety record. The company posted recently on X: “If you love them, put them in a Tesla.”

But whereas Teslas fare well in government-administered crash tests, certain hallmarks of its vehicles — flush door handles, electrical power, mechanical releases — are flummoxing occupants and first responders. This can turn moments after crashes into deadly races against time.

The Virginia crash is one of a string of incidents exposing this paradox. Last November in California, a Tesla Cybertruck slammed into a tree and a wall and caught fire, killing three college students trapped inside. The same month, in Wisconsin, a Model S fire left five dead, with a cluster of bodies in the front seats suggesting to a detective there may have been a struggle to escape. In Los Angeles this spring, an All-American basketball player survived a Cybertruck crash by kicking through a window before bystanders pulled him out by his legs.

Authorities have been slow to catch up. In China, a top regulator is reportedly considering a ban on fully concealed door handles. Europe has taken incremental measures to improve post-crash rescue and extrication protocols. In the US, there’s been little action, although the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Bloomberg News it’s aware of the incidents in this article, as well as complaints about Tesla’s doors that have piled up in the federal agency’s database. Part of the problem: Crash tests are designed to measure impact survivability, not whether occupants can quickly get out of the vehicle afterward.

“Tesla engineers went wildly in the direction of automation and overlooked what happens to the human body after a crash,” says Charles Mauro, founder of Mauro Usability Science, a New York consulting firm that specializes in human factors engineering. “Musk’s idea is a computer on wheels, but the design of the door locks was overlooked.”

The original design brief for the first model Tesla built from the ground up called for a sleek sedan that disposed of conventions for internal combustion engine cars. The flat surfaces of the Model S, which debuted in 2012, improved aerodynamics and reduced wind noise — important attributes for boosting range and minimizing any whirs and whistles an engine would drown out.

This lack of curvature in Tesla’s doors meant less space for the motors and electrical components like those powering the windows, locking systems and handles, according to people familiar with their design, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Instead, Tesla engineers opted for wire-release mechanisms for unlocking the doors in emergencies, one of the people said.

Similar designs have carried through in all Tesla vehicles on the market, including the Cybertruck, which has even less space inside the door to fit components, this person said. The Cybertruck was the first Tesla to do away with handles entirely — the doors open from the outside using buttons next to the bottom corners of the windows.

Where Tesla places manual releases differs by model. In the Model S, for example, manual release cables are located under the carpet below the front of the rear seats.

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