China has been taking a leadership role in automotive safety by identifying and calling attention to defective vehicle door designs. It’s making waves especially because standing up to Tesla means the American car maker now faces real investigations and real consequences.
The situation parallels how cyclist Lance Armstrong, once celebrated in Austin, eventually had his Tour de France victories stripped due to doping violations. Similarly, Elon Musk’s Tesla, also now based in Austin, is finally seeing some accountability for its well-known safety issues.
Any timeline for the overdue potential consequences depends on how much longer regulatory bodies allow Tesla to operate despite what critics see as exploiting gaps in safety oversight—gaps that some argue should have resulted in stricter scrutiny from the very beginning of Tesla let alone from the rise in deaths after 2016.
Business Insider puts it mildly when they say parents are more and more outspoken about children dangerously trapped by known defective Tesla designs:
…the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) launched an investigation into the company.
The regulator cited multiple complaints from parents who said their children had become trapped in Tesla’s Model Y SUV after the electronic controls to open the doors from the outside became inoperable due to low power.
Bloomberg put it like this in their “Dangerous Doors” investigation of Tesla.
And then Jalopnick gives us a straight forward explanation under their headline “Tesla Might Actually Fix Its Garbage, Potentially Deadly Door Handle Design“:
The potential safety issues with Tesla’s interior door release design aren’t just theoretical, either. Back in 2019, one lawsuit blamed the door handles for the death of a Model S owner who was unable to escape his burning Model S. More recently, a Bloomberg investigation found a slew of incidents where people inside a Tesla were injured or killed when they couldn’t open their doors after their cars lost power.
Meanwhile, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has received at least 140 complaints about Tesla’s doors, and just this week, NHTSA opened an investigation into the Tesla Model Y’s door handles that will, thankfully, look into claims the exterior door handles occasionally fail…
This pattern of dangerous design defects extends internationally. In Germany, a country known for rigorous automotive engineering standards similar to China’s approach, their court recently addressed what it called a “deathtrap” of negligent homicide:
The expert’s verdict was damning: Tesla’s automatic door unlocking system failed in the crash. The result? The rear doors were incapable of being opened either from inside or out in the crucial moments after the crash. Laura and Noel, both aged 18, were alive yet tragically were trapped and burned to death as first responders could only watch in horror.
Just a week ago on September 8th I noted two more German crashes with defective doors had killed several people, including two children.
