Welcome to the Daily 5 report for Tuesday, Sept. 16.
They are a really cool feature to some customers, but Tesla Inc.'s modernistic electronic door handles have been raising safety concerns for several years.
NHTSA disclosed an investigation into 174,000 2021 Tesla Model Y vehicles over reports that electronic door handles can become inoperative, Reuters and Bloomberg reported in this story today.
"NHTSA's investigation is focused on the operability of the electronic door locks from outside of the vehicle as that circumstance is the only one in which there is no manual way to open the door," the agency said.
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In some cases, parents weren't able to open doors to get their children out of the car. In four instances, parents broke windows to get kids out of the car, Reuters reported.
NHTSA received more than 140 consumer complaints related to doors on Tesla models getting stuck, not opening or otherwise malfunctioning since 2018, Bloomberg found. But the problems with Tesla door handles actually go further back.
Consumer Reports said 10 years ago that broken door handles were one of the most common problems with the Model S. Drivers also complained about being unable to access their cars when the handles are covered in snow or ice, as this 2019 Bloomberg story explained.
The Bloomberg report also said the genesis of Tesla's door handles emerged in a Wired magazine cover story from December 2018 about Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who insisted on the handles even though it "was unanimous among the executive staff that the complex door handle idea was crazy," a former Tesla executive told Wired.
"Tesla's focus on style over safety and features that push up stock prices rather than protecting occupants and others on the road continues to raise serious concerns," Jason Levine, the former executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, said in a 2019 email to Automotive News. "Tesla should have learned by now that cars catch on fire and first responders must be able to extricate victims from burning vehicles — even if that means making door handles which are accessible at all times."
In other news, our friends at Crain's Detroit Business published this big-picture look at Ford's 10-year campus renovation, punctuated by the headquarters move announced yesterday.
That's it for now. If you want to see this story in your browser, click here.
— Philip Nussel, online editor
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