Tesla Reimagined How Door Handles Work. Now It

Tesla isn’t just a car company. It’s kind of a whole vibe. For two decades, engineers and designers—under Elon Musk’s infamously micro-managing eye, of course—have reimagined entire car components to be cheaper, sleeker or simply more futuristic-looking.

The rest of the car industry quickly followed suit by adding Tesla-style electric door handles to their own cars, especially their EVs. But now that’s become a safety problem that all of them have to deal with.

Subscribe to the industry’s must-read briefing.

Want must-read auto industry and technology insights in your inbox every weekday morning? Subscribe here.

Welcome back to Critical Materials, your daily briefing of industry and technology news—now in email newsletter form, too. Also on deck today: Americans are getting fed up with huge, expensive trucks, and the German government is pushing back on Europe’s 2035 planned ban on internal combustion. 

25%: Electric Handle Complaints Are Rising. Blame Tesla

2026 Tesla Model Y Juniper

Photo by: Patrick George

Call Tesla’s electric door handles a lesson in unintended consequences, then. At the touch of a button, they’re meant to trigger an electronic lock that makes a traditional door handle feel ugly and clunky by comparison. They’re cheaper than those old-school handles as well. And since they’re flush against the door, they do a lot to help a Tesla’s aerodynamic profile and overall EV range.

But then Hyundai, Ford, Rivian, the Chinese automakers and countless others followed suit. Now, led by Tesla, the whole industry is having to rethink the way it once rethought door handles.

For months, Bloomberg has been covering the numerous safety complaints around electronic door handles. In the event of a crash or a power loss, the doors could fail to open. And their discrete, flush nature makes them hard for first responders to access easily in the event of a fire or something similarly life-threatening.

Tesla leads the way on those complaints for sure, and in recent months, the electric carmaker has admitted that it’s having to rethink things. But a new dispatch from Bloomberg points out how electric door handles are now kind of a safety problem for the whole global EV sector:

Complaints to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) about the doors—across all car models—jumped 65% in 2024 from the prior year. Among 520 complaints about electric handles and doors that were filed with federal regulators over the last decade, there were numerous allegations of pets and kids being trapped inside a car after a loss of power.

But drivers have complained to the government about other carmakers as well.

In one complaint, an owner alleged that the battery and doors of a Fisker Ocean failed in a grocery store parking lot, trapping the driver as well as the driver’s elderly mother and young son inside for two hours. 

In another, a driver with mobility issues due to a “bad leg” described crawling through the back cargo space of a 2024 Lexus SUV to escape after the doors wouldn’t open, causing enough pain that the owner ended up in a hospital emergency room. The owner of a Ford Mustang Mach-E alleged being stuck outside the parked car—along with the driver’s brother, nephew and two dogs—stranded three hours from home.  

Specifically, it’s an EV problem because designing cars this way helps offset the high battery costs that make them, on average, more expensive than gas cars.

More and more, automakers are installing manual, back-up door releases for these door handles to head off any safety issues. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. They can still be too hidden in the event of a quick escape.

Now that regulators in China and Europe are stepping in, carmakers may get ahead of this by adding more visible manual-release handles, or combining electric and manual handles, or ensuring power flows to their locks. One example:

Hyundai Motor Co. objected to characterizing its doors or handles as electric, saying the latching mechanism remains mechanical. However, the exterior door handles on its electric models extend and retract using electricity during normal operation. If the battery is drained, they can still be opened by pressing one end inward and inserting a physical key. Similarly, Kia Corp., a Hyundai affiliate, describes its door opening systems as mechanical rather than electric, even though some of its cars feature door handles that extend and retract with electricity.

That story is worth a read in full, because this ongoing safety crisis may have big implications for what your next car looks like—and what could happen in the event of an emergency. 

50%: Are Americans Finally Fed Up With Huge, Expensive Trucks?

2025 Ram Ramcharger

Photo by: InsideEVs

For about the last decade and especially in America, many automakers have essentially become big truck companies that make other kinds of cars as an occasionally lucrative side-hustle.

It made sense for a while: when gas got cheap and interest rates stayed low, Americans gravitated to bigger trucks, and those are profit-margin machines in ways small sedans will never be. Ford famously abandoned its entire car lineup, save for the Mustang, in order to capitalize on truck profits.

So far, this approach has not really worked out in the EV world. The electric truck segment has a few promising and capable contenders, but they’re all expensive, and arguably none can completely replicate the towing and hauling capability of a gas truck.

But now the industry has a bigger problem: squeezed out financially, American buyers are fed up with huge trucks of all kinds. Now they want smaller and more affordable trucks, according to ABC News:

“What we used to call a compact or small truck is now a midsize that absolutely dwarfs the new crop of compact trucks,” Ed Loh, head of editorial at MotorTrend, told ABC News. “People want smaller trucks.”

Loh pointed to the bestselling Ford Maverick, a compact truck that launched in 2021 and quickly gained a loyal following. The Maverick, which is available in five trims, costs less than $29,000 for the XL model, hauls 1,500 lbs and tows up to 4,000 lbs. It also delivers 42 mpg, an anomaly for a truck.

Ivan Drury, director of insights at Edmunds, said more automakers could capitalize on the rising interest in compact trucks, noting that the segment is still tiny: 6% market share versus 52% for large trucks. At least 120,000 Mavericks have sold so far this year compared to 20,000 units of the Santa Cruz, according to Drury.

“Trucks have gotten so large and out of control expensive,” he lamented. “People are asking for cheaper trucks. No one saw this coming.”

If you ask me, it’s an opening for the EV space, too. I’ve long said that the first automaker that can deliver a reasonably priced electric Ford Ranger or Toyota Tacoma competitor will see huge success. And an EV Ford Maverick competitor? Even better, it turns out. People want capability and value these days, and not nine-year car loans just to pay for a truck.

It also makes a strong case for the new $30,000 electric truck that Ford has in the works for 2027. Or the Slate Truck, perhaps, if people can live with its bare-bones nature.

But if buyers are really turning away from big trucks right now, that could mean the whole auto industry is facing a big shift in where profits come from.

75%: German Government Says ‘Nicht Gut’ To 2035 Internal Combustion Ban

BMW iX3 Climate Week NYC

Photo by: Patrick George

The U.S. may be stepping back from the EV subsidies and fuel-economy penalties that once pushed a mostly electric future, but the European Union still isn’t easing up on its hardline climate policies.

A huge sticking point for the auto industry is a planned 2035 ban on new internal combustion vehicles, which carmakers now say is prohibitively expensive, not what customers want and out of step with the realities of EV charging infrastructure.

Now, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who became the country’s leader in May, is formally asking the EU to “soften” that cutoff date. Germany is home to Europe’s largest manufacturing sector and also Europe’s biggest new car market.

Merz wants other options on the table, like hybrids, plug-in hybrids and alternative fuels. From The Guardian:

Merz said he would send a letter to the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Friday, urging Brussels to keep technological options open for carmakers. The sale of new petrol and diesel cars in the EU is scheduled to be banned in a decade’s time.

Merz’s letter hardens the battle lines emerging between Germany’s powerhouse car industry and those pleading with Brussels to stick to its flagship green policy, which is designed to help the EU meet its 2050 carbon-neutral target.

“I will ask the commission, even ⁠after 2035, to continue to allow battery-electric vehicles that also have a combustion engine,”‍ Merz said. “It is much more opportune and pragmatic to invest more effort and money in the development of efficient, hybrid systems that will combine the best of the world of internal combustion engines on the one hand and electric mobility on the other.”

EV adoption in Europe is far ahead of the U.S., as is charger infrastructure growth. But it remains off-pace with growth projections and it’s hardly uniform across the EU’s diverse member states. Meanwhile, the EU government seems like it’s down to hear out the Germans and the auto industry as a whole:

“We’re talking of a very, very important proposal that has big implications around Europe,” she said, adding that a consultation on the issue had closed on 10 October. “We will carefully study everything that comes our way, including the position of the German government today.” 

Volvo, Polestar and a few other players have actually said they support the 2035 ban as it’s written, claiming they have made massive investments around that deadline and intend to meet it.

100%: How Would You Solve The Door Conundrum?

2025 Kia EV6

Photo by: Patrick George

What do you think of the industry’s reckoning with electric door handles? What’s your ideal solution for avoiding a potential safety crisis? The flush handles alone on my 2024 Kia EV6 are tricky on a good day, and I don’t want to think about whether a firefighter could easily use them in the event of a dire crash or not. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com 

More EV News