A 43-year-old man and two children, both aged nine, burned alive trapped in a Tesla in a tragic accident in Western Germany.
According to police, the Tesla drove off the road after attempting to overtake another vehicle in Villigst and crashed into a tree before bursting into flames.
‘Tragically, it caught fire there, and three people inside the vehicle were burned to death. Among them were two children and an adult man,’ said Bernd Pentrop, press spokesman for the Unna District Police Department for Ruhr News.
A local resident tried desperately to open the door using the vehicle’s retractable handles but was unable to, according to German media outlets.
One child was able to escape and was transferred to a hospital in a helicopter.
The retractable door handles on several Tesla models have previously been reported to have stopped working the moment power is cut off.
According to the German Automobile Association, manual opening of the cars is only possible from the inside, which complicates rescue attempts for emergency services.
The North Rhine-Westphalia Police Department’s specialised team will conduct a full analysis of the incident to determine the causes for the tragedy.
‘Our goal is to fully reconstruct the course of events and clearly determine the cause,’ the district police department stated.
The Tesla door handles have drawn attention in the past few days as Bloomberg uncovered several accidents involving passengers being trapped inside the electric vehicle, after an accident, with emergency services being unable to free them.
Max Walsh, an off-duty firefighter from Virginia, recalled an incident in which he had to smash the window to rescue the driver from a burning Tesla Model Y.
By the time Walsh and other emergency services managed to get to the driver’s wife, she suffered lasting lung damage from the smoke and severe burns to her face.
Walsh said that were he able to open the door, he’d be able to get ‘them both out before the fire department even got there.’
Following the report, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation over reports that electronic door handles can become inoperative, according to Reuters.
The administration noted that the door can be manually opened from the inside, but the instructions in the manual are complex and ‘may not be well known to owners,’ according to 20 Minuten.
Tesla’s design chief, Franz von Holzhausen, told Bloomberg on Wednesday that the company is looking to redesign door handles following the reports of incidents.