On Friday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration denied a petition request to investigate the Tesla Model 3’s emergency door handles for being hard to locate, and therefore unsafe, in the event of a crash. However, in that determination, it also vowed to write new rules around handles that “mandate a robust and obvious door egress system in all motor vehicles.”
These rules will take some time to develop; one expert that Bloomberg spoke to estimated that they might not be codified into a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard until 2030 at the earliest. But this is a start, and it isn’t coming a moment too soon.
In recent years, many passengers have found themselves trapped in crashed or burning vehicles and unable to escape, due to a failure of their cars’ electronic door handles combined with an inability to locate the mechanical fail-safes that are often hidden from view. To make matters even worse, those backup handles only tend to exist inside vehicles, making first responders’ jobs that much harder.
Take Rivian, for example. For a backseat passenger to access the emergency handles in a newer R1S or R1T, they must first remove a plastic panel, which shrouds a pull cord. Rivian was reportedly aware of the potential for problems caused by this decision after it made it, as it decided not to conceal the secondary handles in a similar manner in the newer, smaller R2. But the R1 series still works this way, and there’s currently nothing forcing the company to change it.
Ideally, that wouldn’t be the case following this rulemaking process. The NHTSA denied the petition to investigate a defect as it pertained to Tesla specifically because, frankly, Tesla’s system wasn’t defective; it operated as designed, which, unfortunately, leaves way too great a potential for danger in the event of an emergency. Instead, it’s moving to set a standard going forward.
“NHTSA does not believe that the issues presented by the Petitioner indicate the likelihood of a safety related defect that would warrant a defect investigation, and the issue is best addressed through the rulemaking process,” the department’s docket, filed Friday, reads.
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