NHTSA investigating Tesla Model 3 door releases following complaints

PIEDMONT, Calif. – The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a defect investigation into Tesla’s Model 3 vehicles over the car door’s release and concerns the controls may not be easy to find in an emergency – the same concerns of Piedmont families whose college-age children died in a Cybertruck with the same type of door release.

Tesla Model 3 door handles

NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation opened the investigation on Dec. 23 after getting a complaint from a man in Georgia that called the mechanical door release “hidden, unlabeled, and not intuitive to locate during an emergency,” according to the filing. The filing references one incident involving a crash or fire, with one injury.

The agency said the probe covers nearly 180,000 model year 2022 Tesla Model 3 vehicles, where the chief complaint is that the “emergency egress controls are not readily accessible and clearly identifiable.”

Tesla Model Y door handles

This investigation follows another NHTSA inquiry stemming from nine examples of Tesla’s 2021 Model Y cars, where the agency reported parents not being able to get their children out of the back of the car, and they ended up breaking a window to get back in.

Based on NHTSA’s preliminary review, this condition appears to occur when the electronic door locks receive insufficient voltage from the vehicle.

Tesla response

Tesla did not immediately respond Friday to the latest NHTSA investigation.

But in September, Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen told Bloomberg’s Hot Pursuit! podcast that the company was looking to combine the manual and electronic release mechanisms in the doors, which are now separate, in order to make escaping the car easier and quicker in a “panic situation.”

“The idea of combining the electronic one and the manual one together into one button, I think, makes a lot of sense,” he said on the podcast. “That’s something that we’re working on.”

A closer look at Tesla Cybertruck’s design following death of 3 Piedmont students

Nearly a month after three college students died in a fiery Tesla Cybertruck crash in Piedmont, many questions still remain. We took a closer look at the car’s design and talked to experts about the car’s unique features.

Piedmont deaths in Cybertruck

(L-R) Soren Dixon, Krysta Tsukahara and Jack Nelson, all 2023 Piedmont High graduates, were killed in a crash in Piedmont on Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: City of Piedmont 

The door handles are the subject of lawsuits filed by the parents of two college students who died in a fiery crash while they were passengers in a Tesla Cybertruck in Piedmont last year, just before Thanksgiving. The lawsuits allege the tricky design of the Cybertruck’s doors left the college students to die inside.

The families of Krysta Tsukahara, 19, and Jack Nelson, 20, have each filed separate lawsuits against Tesla.

Shortly after that fatal crash, KTVU took a closer look at the Cybertruck design, especially the issues with its electric doors and hard-to-break windows, exposing some of the same issues that the federal government is now investigating.

In a Cybertruck, the manual release for the door locks is a latch on the door in the front of the car by the window switches, and under a plastic well in the back “map pocket” of the car.

“It was clear to us that the door failed to operate because it lost power,” Roger Dreyer, the attorney for Krista’s parents, Noelle and Carl Tsukahara, said in a previous interview in October.

Nelson also survived the initial impact of the crash, his parents’ attorney, Matthew Davis, said at the time.

“His injuries were relatively minor,” Davis said. “What killed him was that he couldn’t get out of the car.”

A Bloomberg investigation this month found that 15 people have died over the last decade after being unable to open Tesla vehicle doors following a crash.