Tesla redesigns its door handles after security round, Bloomberg Investigation | Techcrunch

Tesla “is working on” re -designing his door handles, so that they are less likely to catch people in the company’s cars, main designer Franz von Holzhausen Bloomberg news told On Wednesday.

The news came just one day after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a probe in Tesla’s door handles, and a week after a Bloomberg news research, several cases emphasized in which owners or passengers were in their car after a crash.

Von Holzhausen did not state when Tesla made the decision to reconsider how the door is going, according to Bloomberg. China has already encouraged car manufacturers to reconsider the use of completely hidden door handles due to safety problems, although the best regulator in the country has not taken any definitive action.

One of the two clear problems with the door handles from Tesla is that they use electronic locks, which can stop working if they do not receive electricity from the car battery system. The other is that although Tesla has built manual door releases into his cars, they are often difficult to find and are difficult to access.

“The idea of ​​combining the electronic and manual together in one button, I think, is very logical,” Von Holzhausen told Bloomberg. “That is something we are working on.”

NHTSA opened his investigation on Tuesday after the agency said it had received nine complaints from Tesla owners who had experienced a failure with their door handles. In four of those cases, the security agency said that the owners had to break a window “to get access to the vehicle back.”

Tesla contains instructions in the owner’s manuals that describe how to use an external power source to activate dead electronic door locks, as both NHTSA and Bloomberg have noticed. But NHTSA noted in his provisional report that none of the owners who contacted the agency reported that warnings for low-voltage batteries have seen what means that they would probably not have known what caused the problem.