Why couldn’t the kids get out? That simple question launched a yearlong investigation that uncovered a hidden risk within the EV revolution: electric car-door handles that too often fail, turning survivable crashes into fatal entrapments. Through a series of groundbreaking articles and an accompanying documentary, Bloomberg News combined data-based analysis, first-person accounts of crashes, public-records requests and deep sourcing to show that Tesla’s faulty doors can trap riders, contributing to at least 15 deaths.
The day before Thanksgiving 2024 in a suburb of San Francisco, three college students died after the Tesla Cybertruck they were riding in crashed and caught fire. A friend couldn’t open the vehicle’s electrically powered doors and smashed a window with a tree branch, pulling one passenger to safety. The other occupants died of smoke inhalation and burns — not from the crash itself, but because they couldn’t escape.
Following that tragedy, Bloomberg reporters Emily Chang and Dana Hull, along with colleagues across the newsroom, uncovered scores of other similar episodes in which people were hospitalized, had limbs amputated or died when they couldn’t escape vehicles. The reporters interviewed victims and witnesses, gathered official documents, spoke with experts and found inside sources to connect dots no one had linked before.
Bloomberg’s initial report told stories of those affected – a frantic mother trying to rescue her trapped toddler, a husband and wife hospitalized when rescuers couldn’t get into their smoke-filled SUV, the college friends who perished – and established that regulatory inaction allowed a safety crisis to grow. Bloomberg subsequently quantified deaths linked to electric doors, statistics that aren’t tracked by any state or federal agency, and found that the hazardous technology had spread across the industry. The series culminated in the revelation that Elon Musk personally insisted on electric doors despite being warned internally of potential safety risks.
