Tesla is once again back on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) radar, this time for its electronic door handles, which may become inoperative and trap people inside their vehicles.
According to the investigation tagged PE25010, the agency"s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is looking into the 2021 Tesla Model Y. This preliminary evaluation follows complaints from nine owners who found themselves unable to open their car doors from the outside.
The most frequently described situation involved parents who got out of the car, for instance, to get a child out of the back seat, only to find the doors would not reopen, locking them out. Out of those nine cases, four reportedly had to smash a window to get back inside their own car.
The ODI report expresses particular concern for scenarios where children are left inside. An occupant, especially a small child, might not know about or be able to operate the manual door releases located inside the cabin.
The ODI suspects that the reason could be a power supply issue: it"s possible that the electronic door locks do not receive sufficient voltage from the vehicle.
Based on ODI"s preliminary review, this condition appears to occur when the electronic door locks receive insufficient voltage from the vehicle. Available repair invoices report replacement of the vehicle’s low voltage battery after the incident. However, no VOQs reported seeing a low voltage battery warning prior to the exterior door handles becoming inoperative.
The ODI also noted that the Tesla Manual does have sections on "Jump Starting" as well as "Opening the Hood with No Power". These sections describe a complicated, multi-step process for getting the exterior door handles working again. The procedure requires an external 12-volt DC power source and knowledge of specific connection points on the vehicle"s exterior.
The door handle investigation is the latest in a series of federal inquiries into the automaker. Before this, NHTSA opened an Audit Query into the automaker"s handling of crash data for its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems, examining why Tesla submitted some crash reports months late and covers 37 products across the Model 3, S, X, and Y lines.