You will never stay stuck in a Tesla again: the brand reviews its handles after several incidents

They were supposed to embody the future: smooth, discreet, without the slightest roughness. But Tesla’s electronic handles are today in the viewfinder of the American authorities, after several cases of emergency blocking. The manufacturer now promises a return to the good old mechanical lever, merged into a single gesture. A confession? Or just an industrial survival reflex.

Tesla reviews (finally) her door handles, after cases of emergency blocking

Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla chief designer, recognized him half-word in a podcast with Bloomberg :: “We work to combine the electronic handle with the rescue mechanism, in order to panic, the right reflex is in the same place. It will be enough to shoot a little louder”. Clearly: Tesla comes back partly.

This change of course occurs in a tense context: the NHTSA, the federal agency responsible for road safety in the United States, has opened a preliminary survey targeting the Tesla Model Y From 2021. In question, nine reports evoking doors impossible to open from the outside, sometimes while a child had remained inside the vehicle. In four of these cases, parents claim to have been forced to break a window to access the cabin.

According to the first observations, the problem would come from a 12 -volt battery failure, without prior alert, coupled with the total absence of an external mechanical handle – making access impossible in the event of an electric cut. And inside, the table is hardly more brilliant. If a manual handle exists, it is often poorly reported, or even not found at the back. Enough to disorient a passenger in distress or a rescuer.

This affair falls in the worst moment. In China, a bill threatens to prohibit all vehicles whose handles do not have a visible mechanical trigger … Tesla, whose aesthetics are precisely on this disappearance of roughness, is found in an impasse. We will therefore have to reinvent a handle that does not betray the design while reassuring the regulators. A balancingist exercise… under close surveillance.

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