The Hidden Lever: A PSA & What Tesla’s Door Handles Reveal About Its Safety Culture - CleanTechnica

The article highlights a critical safety concern regarding Tesla vehicles, particularly the Model 3 and Model Y, focusing on their door handle design and emergency exit mechanisms. While Teslas are increasingly common in rideshare fleets, their sleek electronic door handles and touchscreen controls can become useless if the car loses power during an emergency such as a crash, flood, or fire. In such cases, occupants must rely on mechanical manual releases to open the doors, which exist but are often hidden or unintuitive. For the front doors, a small lever near the window switches can be lifted to unlatch the door manually, but this control is easy to miss and rarely used in normal operation. Rear doors have even more concealed manual releases, tucked behind removable panels or covers, making them difficult to find quickly in a crisis. The trunk also includes a glow-in-the-dark manual release for escape from inside. The article stresses that Tesla’s current design places a heavy burden on users to know and remember these manual release locations and operations,