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A long time ago — 2015 — in a galaxy far, far away — Silicon Valley — Elon Musk and his engineering team were working feverishly on the design for the Tesla Model 3, the first electric vehicle from the young startup aimed at mainstream buyers. The Model S and Model X that preceded it were unabashedly aimed at upscale drivers, and the profits from those cars were always intended to fund the development of more affordable models.
The Model 3 would be the first of what at the time people assumed would be a full range of electric cars that would shift the EV revolution into high gear. In early 2016, the conversation was focused on the door handles for the Model 3. People who bought the Model X, with is futuristic falcon wing doors, were complaining about faulty buttons and sensors. The question being hotly debated was whether the Model 3 should have electrically operated door handles, or mechanical door handles like the ones virtually every other manufacturer used?
Channeling Apple
According to research conducted by Bloomberg’s David Welch, Edward Ludlow, and Dana Hull, Musk insisted that everything in the new vehicle should be controlled electrically through the push of a button or tap of a touchscreen — including the doors. Their investigation found at least 15 deaths in a dozen incidents over the past decade in which occupants or rescuers were unable to open the doors of a Tesla that had crashed and caught fire. Their conclusions were based on a review of thousands of pages of police, fire, and autopsy reports obtained through public records requests.
In talking to current and former Tesla employees, they learned that Musk was an admirer of how Apple had created a simple, software-driven touchscreen interface that was easier to use than the button-heavy BlackBerry and he wanted the Model 3 to have a similarly futuristic design, according to several people who spoke with the reporters. During one meeting, he told his engineers, “The best part is no part.”
For those who don’t know, on Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, the door handles, interior lights, and the Bluetooth system that recognizes drivers through their smartphones when they approach their cars are powered by electricity supplied by a 12 volt lead acid battery. The systems work fine, as long as power is available, but if there is no 12 volt power, people inside can’t get out and rescue personnel can’t get in.
Trapped Inside A Burning Car
At CleanTechnica, we have published a number of stories about people being trapped in their Tesla automobiles. In 2023, Venkateswara Pasumarti and his wife Susmita Maddi were trapped inside their Tesla Model Y after it struck a utility pole. Max Walsh, an off-duty firefighter, rushed to the scene but found the exterior door handle was not operative.
He was able to smash the driver’s door window, but then was unable to open the door from the inside, so he wound up dragging the driver out through the window opening. The wife, however, could not be reached because the passenger door was smashed against the utility pole.
She was pinned in place by air bags as flames began entering the passenger compartment. According to a report by Bloomberg’s Dana Hull and others, people outside the car tried to break windows on the passenger side of the Model Y but were unable to do so. Only the arrival of a Jaws of Life hydraulic device made it possible for her to be extricated from the car.
The couple have sued Tesla, which is defending itself in part by claiming the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards do not require mechanical door release mechanisms. That is pure sophistry, as the very idea of electrically operated door handles had never even been thought of when the FMVSS standards were written.
More recently, the estates of people who died when they were trapped inside a burning Cybertruck have also sued Tesla, and once again, instead of admitting liability and doing the right thing, Tesla is fighting back with every legal tool it can find in the hope that the plaintiffs will wear themselves out and settle for far less than they deserve. Elon complains long and loud about what he calls “lawfare,” but nobody practices hardball legal tactics better than he does.
Michael Barnard On Electric Door Locks
Earlier this year, my colleague Michael Barnard wrote passionately about the danger of Tesla’s electric door mechanisms and what they can tell us about the culture inside Tesla. He said, “Tesla’s door handle design isn’t just a quirk. It’s a symptom.”
The modern automotive industry is built on a century of safety evolution, each generation of engineers learning hard lessons from the one before. Safety isn’t an aesthetic choice or an optional upgrade; it’s a design philosophy baked into every phase of development. Cars are engineered around failure scenarios, not best-case ones.
That’s why traditional automakers build redundancy into door locks, braking systems, steering assist, and electrical supply. They design for the crash, not the commute. Every mechanical control that can save a life is supposed to be reachable, obvious, and independent of fragile systems like power electronics or networked control units. The discipline of automotive safety is defined by these guardrails: if it can fail, it must fail safe; if it’s critical, it must have a backup.
Across the industry, engineers adhere to rigorous international standards that formalize those principles. ISO 26262 governs functional safety for automotive electronics, requiring hazard analyses, fault tolerance, and graded levels of protection depending on the severity and controlability of failure modes. Standards like FMVSS in North America and UNECE regulations in Europe ensure that crash structures, restraint systems, and emergency egress designs meet consistent benchmarks across models and years.
Testing doesn’t just simulate ideal operation — it stresses edge cases: high-speed collisions, submersion, power loss, and post-impact egress. That’s why features like mechanical door releases, steering columns, and manual parking brakes persist even in the most digitized vehicles. The philosophy is simple but unyielding: when power fails, when sensors glitch, when the improbable happens, people still need to walk away. [Emphasis added.]
Multiple Considerations
There were both practical and ergonomic reasons for eliminating mechanical door releases, the Bloomberg investigation found. For one thing, it reduced the number of parts needed to build the vehicles, which meant Tesla could afford to lower prices. But some engineers liked that the interior push button release could be positioned at the top of the armrest where the driver’s hand would naturally go when opening the door. This was seen as an improvement over the mechanical latches in most cars.
Once the decision was made to prioritize electrically operated door release mechanisms, the engineers began discussing how to mitigate potential safety risks. It was decided to incorporate manual releases into the front door handles, but adding them to the rear doors was considered less of a priority, particularly since federal safety regulations did not require them. The first Model 3 sedans had none, but Tesla added them to later versions.
The company decided to put the burden on the staff at its delivery centers to inform customers picking up their new cars how to find those emergency releases. My experience may be statistically irrelevant because it relies on a sample size of one, but when my wife and I picked up our Model Y four years ago, not a word was spoken about emergency door releases. (Nor was anything said about how to use Autopilot.)
Finding The Rear Door Release Cable
Photo by Carolyn Fortuna for CleanTechnica. All rights reserved.
I have added bright yellow safety pulls to the rear doors of my car, but I can tell you that no one trapped inside a car filling with smoke and flames would ever figure out how to access the mechanical release cable, which is hidden beneath a black plastic cover under a black rubber mat at the bottom of a black storage bin. While installing those emergency pull tabs, I couldn’t help thinking about how terrifying it would be to be trapped in the back seat and not knowing how to open the door.
One of the considerations is that the side windows in a Model 3 or Model Y fit tightly against a gasket at the top of the door opening and behind the edge of the roof. That’s why when the button is pushed to enter or exit, the window retracts about an inch. This is wonderful for making the interior of the car as quiet as possible but it also means the window can be damaged if the mechanical release is used.
In my opinion, this situation clearly illustrates Elon Musk’s inability to empathize with his customers. His mind is 100% on his own concerns — lower costs and cool features — and not on what it will be like to be a teenager trapped inside a burning Cybertruck. This insensitivity to the needs of others is central to Musk’s character and marks him as a borderline sociopath — a characteristic common among his tech bro peers.
An Update Appears
Bloomberg reports that last week, Tesla updated the safety page on its website to say the doors of its vehicles now automatically unlock for emergency access when a serious collision is detected. It wasn’t immediately clear when this functionality was made available and for which models. In a footnote, the company says certain features may not be available in all regions or for all vehicles, or depending on build date.
As a Tesla owner, you might think I would have heard about this change, but as is typical with this company, consumers must actively ferret out such information for themselves. Musk will crow from the rooftops about his humanoid robots but slips vital safety concerns into a little noticed web update. He just seems unable to act like a normal human being, which is a big part of his charm, apparently.
The way he thinks is best revealed by this quote, “I think generally, all input is error. If you have to do something that the car could have done already, that should be taken care of — the software should just do it,” Musk said and added that Tesla would “keep minimizing the amount of input that you need to do until the car just reads your mind.” Musk may be applauded for imagining the possible but deserves condemnation for his stubborn refusal to incorporate reality into his thinking.
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