Another lawsuit has been filed against Tesla, alleging that poor door handle design in the 2016 Model S trapped five occupants after a crash, leading to their deaths. The lawsuit is filed among heightened public scrutiny of Tesla’s door handle designs.
The lawsuit stems from a 2024 crash in Wisconsin. A Model S driven by Barry Sievers veered off of a semi-rural road and crashed into a tree in Verona, Wisconsin, outside Madison. The Dane County Sheriff’s Office says multiple factors played a role in the crash, including road conditions, excess speed, and impaired driving.
A nearby resident was awakened by the sound of the crash, and called 911 to report that she had heard it. After providing details of the crash, she stated “the car is on fire now.” She also said that she heard screaming up to five minutes into the 911 call.
Four other passengers were inside the car, and all five occupants died after the crash. The lawsuit was filed by the families of Jeffrey Bauer and Michelle Bauer, who were riding in the car, in the front and rear seats respectively.
Plaintiffs allege that Tesla was negligent in the design of the vehicle, and that it did not incorporate certain safety features into the design of its door handles and battery pack that could have made the crash more survivable.
Lawsuit claims Tesla negligent in door handle design
Tesla vehicles use an electronic door release. Rather than having a mechanical attachment between the door handle and the door, the door handle release sends an electronic signal which then triggers the door release. This allows Tesla to make novel door handle designs, but also means that if the car loses power, the normal door handles aren’t operable.
Tesla does include mechanical door releases as a fallback, but these are in different places in each of their vehicles. Front door release is typically a lever in front of the window switches, whereas the rear door releases are under the map pocket in the Model 3, Model Y and Cybertruck, or behind the speaker grille in the Model X.
On the 2016 Model S, Tesla did actually include a fallback mechanical door release for the front door handles. They would work electronically in most cases, but when the car had no power, the normal door handle would work mechanically.
However, the rear seat had an obscured mechanical release, under a piece of carpet under the rear seats. This is noted in the owners’ manual, but most passengers would not be aware of it.
In the case of this crash, the lawsuit alleges that the vehicle lost power, which made the door handles inoperable. It is unclear why the front door handles, which work mechanically when the car is without power, wouldn’t have operated.
The lawsuit claims that Tesla had heard repeated complaints about its door handles, and did not modify its design to something simpler or more robust in a crash.
It notes comments in 2025 from Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen stating that Tesla is working on combining electronic and mechanical releases into one button. It states that Tesla’s inclusion of a mechanical fallback on the original Model S suggests that they knew this would have been a good thing to do, yet did not provide a fallback for the rear doors (though it did for the front doors in this particular vehicle; again, it’s unclear why that didn’t work here, and the lawsuit seems to dance around the fact that these mechanical releases were included on the front doors of this vehicle). It also states that Tesla’s inclusion of a label on newer vehicles showing where the emergency door release is demonstrates that Tesla’s original designs lacked clarity.
Lawsuit claims Tesla’s battery lacked safety features included in later models
The lawsuit also claims that the 2016 Model S lacked safety features that it should have included, which were included in later models.
In particular, it says that there were not adequate firewalls or intumescent/fire-suppressive materials to isolate the spread of fire in a crash. These intumescent materials expand when heated to insulate and delay the spread of fire, and were included on the Model 3, which has seen fewer accidents like this as a result.
The lawsuit says that Tesla’s decisions on the Model S did not comply with UL and SAE recommendations for battery pack safety. These recommendations are voluntary standards, not legal ones.
Similar to the argument on door handles, the lawsuit says that Tesla’s inclusion of suppressant materials in later vehicles suggests that it recognized its error in not including them on earlier vehicles.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages against Tesla for negligence, and additional punitive damages “in an amount sufficient to punish Defendant Tesla for its egregious misconduct and to deter similar conduct in the future.” It also names the driver, suing him and his insurance company for negligence.
Electrek’s Take
This story feels like it’s much more about the door handles than the battery pack, to me. Besides, regardless of design, EVs on the whole are much less likely to catch fire than combustion-engined vehicles (I mean, combustion is right there in the name…).
The call from the nearby resident suggests that there may have been time between the crash and the fire starting, and the sound of screams suggests that occupants were alive for some time. All of this suggests that there should have been time for the occupants to get out of the vehicle – if they had a reliable way to exit the vehicle.
So, that leads us to the door handles, where Tesla has a poorly designed mechanical release in the rear, and it’s understandable that the passengers wouldn’t have been able to find that. But, the Model S does have a fallback mechanical release in the front doors, unlike most Tesla vehicles, and should have been operable in the event of a crash.
But anything can happen in a crash, so it’s possible the front seat occupants were both unconscious or otherwise unable to operate the doors, leaving the rear seat passengers trapped with their hidden door releases. It’s likely that more information on this will come out during discovery, when lawyers get access to the car’s data recorder.
Concerns over Tesla’s door handle design have gotten louder over time, with recent scrutiny from governments and lawsuits. Tesla is currently being investigated by the NHTSA over its door handle design, an investigation which was just widened by the NHTSA last week. Tesla has confirmed that it is finally redesigning its handles, but we don’t know when that fix might be coming.
Elsewhere in the world, Chinese auto regulators are mulling a ban on retractable door handles, as many sleek new EVs have taken on the trend that Tesla started with its flush door handles.
And another lawsuit is currently pending against Tesla, filed last month over a crash which led to the death of 3 teens in a Cybertruck. The Cybertruck has no exterior door handles, which meant the car was inaccessible to a rescuer who was on the scene and had to bash through the car’s “armor glass” window to pull the one survivor out.
Given this widening chorus of calls for Tesla and other automakers to simplify their door handles, it sounds like change must be on the horizon.
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