Tesla Is Being Investigated by the Feds for Model Y’s Electric Door Handles
Several parents have reported they can’t open the doors, leaving their children locked inside, so now NHTSA is investigating.
Tesla
The 2021 Tesla Model Y’s electric door handles may not work, so the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has opened an investigation.
The federal safety agency said that nine customers have reported complaints, including several parents who had their children locked inside the EV SUV.
The issue involves roughly 174,000 models and is caused by a low-voltage battery; NHTSA is looking into the process and the severity of the problem.
UPDATE 9/23/25: With Tesla facing scrutiny over the safety of its electric door handles, the brand’s design chief Franz von Holzhausen said there are plans to redesign them, as reported by Bloomberg. The new design is intended to help in “panic situations” by not having the manual door release in a separate location. “The idea of combining the electronic one and the manual one together into one button, I think, makes a lot of sense,” Holzhausen recently said on Bloomberg’s Hot Pursuit! podcast. “That’s something that we’re working on.”
The Tesla Model Y is the brand’s most popular model, but the compact EV SUV is now being investigated by a federal safety agency due to some instances when its electric door handles didn’t work. The inquiry comes after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said its Office of Defects Investigation received nine reports from people who owned a 2021 Tesla Model Y, claiming they experienced instances where they couldn’t open the doors from the outside.
Several of the customer complaints were made by parents who said their children were locked inside the vehicle, according to the NHTSA document. This reportedly occurred after they exited the Model Y following a drive or before they went for a drive, but after they put their child in the back seat. When they were unable to open the door, the report claims that four people said they had to break a window.
Tesla
While every vehicle with electric door handles is legally required to have a manual door release, including the Model Y, the one inside can be impossible for a child to access, let alone know how to use. Obviously, this type of situation can be dangerous when temperatures are high and the vehicle isn’t immediately accessible. Of course, there is another way to manually unlock the electrically powered doors from outside the Model Y. However, it’s reportedly a complicated process that involves opening the hood and applying 12 volts DC to two separate points. NHTSA says the incidents suggest the owners were unaware of the process.
The agency’s preliminary review identified an insufficient voltage as the reason behind the Model Y’s non-working door handles. Although the reported cases led to replacing the EV’s low-voltage battery, there were reportedly no signs beforehand (i.e., dashboard warning lights). That’s among the reasons that the feds are investigating the issue, with the goal of understanding the “scope and severity” of the problem, as well as the “approach used by Tesla to supply power to the door locks and the reliability of the applicable power supplies.”
For now, the focus of the investigation is on manually unlocking the Model Y’s doors from the outside. NHTSA says it will be on the lookout for additional incidents and will take further action if necessary.
This story was originally published on September 16, 2025.
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Eric Stafford
Managing Editor, News
Eric Stafford’s automobile addiction began before he could walk, and it has fueled his passion to write news, reviews, and more for Car and Driver since 2016. His aspiration growing up was to become a millionaire with a Jay Leno–like car collection. Apparently, getting rich is harder than social-media influencers make it seem, so he avoided financial success entirely to become an automotive journalist and drive new cars for a living. After earning a journalism degree at Central Michigan University and working at a daily newspaper, the years of basically burning money on failed project cars and lemon-flavored jalopies finally paid off when Car and Driver hired him. His garage currently includes a 2010 Acura RDX, a manual ’97 Chevy Camaro Z/28, and a ’90 Honda CRX Si.
