Door handles

Does this happen with both fobs, or only one? If you press the handle at the car, any rection? If you double-click the trunk on the fobs, does it open? Do the doors unlock via the app? Each of these could help clarify what is going on.

Auto- Present Handles are disabled when ...

To preserve battery life, Model S is designed to temporarily disable the Auto-Present Handles feature when:

• The key has been out of range for more than 48 hours.
• The key remains within range for five minutes after all doors have been closed.
• In these cases, extend the handles by touching the driver’s door handle or pressingthe unlock button on the key.

P85DBeast said:

I have only had my tesla model s p85d for 3 months now after I replaced my 60kWh battery and the door handles didn't want to open at all so I called tesla becuase I couldn't get in the car. So they came 30 mins later and took the car and gave me a standard p85 and for the next 2 week's they were fine but today they did the same thing none of them extended I just want to know what is wrong with theese handles I love my car but I don't love it today

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Are you sure your P85D has a 60 kWh battery? The 85 in the name stands for 85kWh battery.

dsm363 said:

Are you sure your P85D has a 60 kWh battery? The 85 in the name stands for 85kWh battery.

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The Op has another thread about having a wrecked S60 that was replaced with a P85D and is wondering what to do with the 60 (part it out or rebuild it).

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P85DBeast said:

It does work with both key fobs and the trunk works with both of them I dobt know what they problem is???

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What happens if you push on the handle when you experience this issue?

I can't believe door handles are still a problem. Consumer Reports' P85D had this problem too:

...one on the driver’s door of our P85D didn’t pop out, leaving us no way to open the door from the outside. And significantly, with the car sensing a problem, wouldn’t drive. We were able to move the car a short distance, thanks to the smartphone app that allows us to unlock the car and authorize two minutes of keyless driving, requiring a spry staffer to crawl behind the steering wheel from the passenger seat.

Consumer Reports' Tesla Model S P85D Breaks Before Testing Begins - Consumer Reports

Room_A113 said:

I can't believe door handles are still a problem. Consumer Reports' P85D had this problem too:

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Exactly what I was thinking. Hopefully the Consumer Reports incident will spur them to fix it once and for all.

Yonki said:

Exactly what I was thinking. Hopefully the Consumer Reports incident will spur them to fix it once and for all.

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Tesla is getting a lot of really bad publicity from the Consumer Reports door handle issue. Pretty much the rets of the lamestreet media has picked this up with news articles about how Tesla owners can't even get into their cars. Even the Mercedes forum people are gleefully talking about this.

They need to design this door handles so that there an absolute manual fail safe built into the mechanism. Even if the vehicle is submerged and all electronics are fried you should be able to push on the door handle to retract it and then pull it to open the door.

MsElectric said:

Tesla is getting a lot of really bad publicity from the Consumer Reports door handle issue. Pretty much the rets of the lamestreet media has picked this up with news articles about how Tesla owners can't even get into their cars. Even the Mercedes forum people are gleefully talking about this.

They need to design this door handles so that there an absolute manual fail safe built into the mechanism. Even if the vehicle is submerged and all electronics are fried you should be able to push on the door handle to retract it and then pull it to open the door.

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In all fairness in using your example (I know, you were just throwing a far fetched one out there), the inside front door handles are manually connected. If you pull those even with zero power in the car, the front doors will open. The rear handles are not manually connected, but there is a manual release at the edges of the seat under the carpeting.

Overall, I would not be opposed to being able to manually open the doors from outside the vehicle.

I know a lot of people like the gee-whiz factor of the auto-present door handles, but I really feel like they are the Achilles Heel of the car. Reinventing the operation of something so essential to the basic operation of the car is fine if the new solution is a) equally or more reliable, and b) offers tangible benefit. a) is definitely not true here, and b) is debatable.

On my uncle's S60, the driver door has taken to opening itself whenever the handle auto-presents (not every time, but often enough). This is at best inconvenient (door opening when you were walking up to it but didn't actually intend to enter the car -- happened to me several times when all I wanted to do was peek at the charging status), and at worst a security hazard (door opening itself when shifting to park, or when someone outside pushes on another handle on the car -- and yes, both of these happened to me).

The fancy touch-sensitive handles on my Audi have none of these issues and are much easier to use (they always work, I never have to wait for them, push on them, etc.). This issue really sticks out for me because everything else in the Tesla is so well thought out and awesome. My wife experienced door handle wonkiness as well, and has already commented that the computerized nature of the car "scares" her because of that experience. And we only had the car for a day.

I really hope that the Model X and 3 go back to normal (or, at least, more normal) door handles, because the current ones are a blemish on an otherwise stellar experience when using the car.

Cyclone said:

In all fairness in using your example (I know, you were just throwing a far fetched one out there), the inside front door handles are manually connected. If you pull those even with zero power in the car, the front doors will open. The rear handles are not manually connected, but there is a manual release at the edges of the seat under the carpeting.

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Which, quite frankly, I've always thought was a substantial safety issue. In the event of some kind of emergency, does every one of your rear passengers know if the car loses power they need to fumble around under the seats to find a tiny slit in the carpet, move that carpet aside, find a little tab connected to a wire, and then yank on it to escape the vehicle?

Not exactly a great first impression: "Hey, come for a ride in the Tesla! Oh, by the way, in case of emergency you might have to find and yank on some wire under the seat to get out. Have fun!"

Tesla got a lot right, but they botched some fundamentals. Door handles are something that should always work. You should always be able to close the hood without damaging it. This is basic stuff.

Gizmotoy said:

Which, quite frankly, I've always thought was a substantial safety issue. In the event of some kind of emergency, does every one of your rear passengers know if the car loses power they need to fumble around under the seats to find a tiny slit in the carpet, move that carpet aside, find a little tab connected to a wire, and then yank on it to escape the vehicle?

Not exactly a great first impression: "Hey, come for a ride in the Tesla! Oh, by the way, in case of emergency you might have to find and yank on some wire under the seat to get out. Have fun!"

Tesla got a lot right, but they botched some fundamentals. Door handles are something that should always work. You should always be able to close the hood without damaging it. This is basic stuff.

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I've never figured out why, if they could do the mechanical linkage on the front handles, they couldn't do the same on the rears.

Tesla isn't the only one with a similar situation though, I once sat in a car (I think it was a corvette?) at an auto show, the person running the booth had to show me how to use the emergency release under the carpet to get out again because the car had no power so the interior door handles didn't work. I thought at the time it was a ridiculous design. (worst part there was that the handles didn't even have Tesla's excuse to be electronic, they looked every bit like normal handles)

Let's just hope that the "Consumer Reports" fiasco provides the impetus for Tesla to really fix the issue once and for all.

I'm not sure how many times we need to repeat this on the forums, but the rear interior handles are not mechanically linked to the door latches due to the need to support the Child Protection Lock feature. When you enable Child Protection Lock, the computer simply doesn't respond to rear interior handle pulls. Sure, I guess they could have placed some electro-mechanical device to physically link/un-link the rear handles to the latch when toggling the feature, but it would be more complex and costly.

ken830 said:

Sure, I guess they could have placed some electro-mechanical device to physically link/un-link the rear handles to the latch when toggling the feature, but it would be more complex and costly.

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Right. Unlike the existing electro-mechanical door handles, which aren't complex or costly at all ...

CricTic said:

Right. Unlike the existing electro-mechanical door handles, which aren't complex or costly at all ...

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:biggrin: Indeed. You can repeat the it on the forums all you want, but that doesn't make it make any more sense to me. Especially when you could have done the mechanical disconnect with a switch inside the door like the millions of other cars on the road. Not as fancy, but still cheap and safer than what we got.

The rear handles have a mechanical way of opening from the inside. The "pulls" are in front of the rear seating. One for each side.