Regulators and consumers have grown increasingly skeptical of power door handles, as safety concerns have mounted. Yet Volvo, a company known for its relentless focus on safety advancements, is still fitting its most important new electric vehicle with shark-fin shaped electronic door handles. The reason, according to one executive, is simple: design them right and there shouldn’t be a safety issue.
“We’re launching with our shark fin door handles in the middle of an ongoing debate on door handle safety, which is a kind of a bit of a misguided point, because it’s about system safety, not our door handles, really,” Anders Bell, Volvo’s chief technology officer, told reporters at the EX60 crossover’s launch event on Wednesday.
The EX60 uses a “shark fin” door handle, with a little rubber button on the back side actuating the door mechanism. I still prefer a mechanical handle, but at least these can still be opened in one fluid motion, unlike the setup on the Tesla Cybertruck.
Photo by: Volvo
“The reason I say it’s a bit misguided is because it’s not really about door handles, it’s about redundancy. It’s all about being able to quickly exit the car in a reliable way if you’re in the crash, but also, if you’re unconscious, that somebody else can get you out,” he said.
Regulatory scrutiny on power door handles is all based on the extraction problem. Electronic door handles require power to function, unlike traditional manual latches. When a vehicle crashes or loses power, the handles often can’t function. In the vast majority of cars, there are mechanical releases to address that issue. But the mere presence of a backup isn’t enough if you don’t know how to use it.
One illustrative if horrible example involved a 2007 Chevrolet Corvette, which featured power door releases inside. In 2015, a 72-year-old man and his dog were in the vehicle when its 12-volt battery died. The Corvette had a mechanical backup handle, but presumably unaware of the floor-mounted release, he tried in vain to get out. On a hot sunny day in Texas, his time ran out. The man and his dog died in the incident.
Volkswagen had to stop selling the ID.4 for the better part of 2024, after issues with its door handles prompted a worldwide scramble to fix it.
They were not the last victims of poorly designed power door handles. The family of a Tesla Cybertruck owner who died in a fiery crash has alleged in a lawsuit that he was unable to exit the vehicle due to the difficulty of locating the hidden mechanical door release. But even the designs that include intuitive mechanical releases on the inside may suffer from a separate, but also potentially fatal, flaw.
While a passenger may theoretically be able to get out of a Tesla Model S with a dead battery, if they are incapacitated, there is no easy way for first responders or bystanders to open the doors from the outside, as another fiery, fatal incident demonstrated. The same issue afflicts the Xiaomi SU7. An owner in China got trapped inside a burning SU7 and died, kicking off the first big regulatory push to ban dangerous door handle designs.
The Xiaomi SU7 was one of the hottest EV launches of all time. But in one incident, after a crash incapacitated the driver and started a fire, bystanders say they were unable to save the driver’s life because they couldn’t open the doors. The incident prompted regulators to push for safer designs.
So you can understand why some people are concerned. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is currently investigating whether Tesla’s door handles have inherent safety issues, and one member of Congress has proposed a federal law mandating that door handles be designed to opened quickly and intuitively in emergencies.
Volvo isn’t expecting consumers to have any problems with its design, though, because it has solved the biggest issue with electronic door handles. Both the shark-fin style exterior doorhandles —with little buttons on the inner side that pop the door—and the interior power-operated door latch should function even if a crash destroys the car’s battery, Bell claims.
The solution for the interior is obvious, and has been adopted by a few other EVs, including the original Model S. In the EX60, Bell says, the mechanical interior door release and the electronic release are activated by the same handle.
The electronic door release is integrated into the armrest, ahead of the window controls. But the mechanical release is mounted to the same handle. Pull gently, and the electronics pop the door. Pull hard and the cable triggers a mechanical release.
Photo by: Volvo
“So you pull a little, you open them electrically. You pull more, you open mechanically,” he said. This way, when you frantically panic and yank on the door handle, you’ll get exactly what you want. It’s no wonder that many automakers are using similar designs. But the trickier issue is having a safe way to open the car from the outside in the case of an accident. Volvos, Bell notes, already unlock their doors automatically when crashed. And when someone pulls the handle, it’ll open, even with a completely dead or destroyed 12-volt battery.
“We have redundancy for that, too,” Bell says. In an EV, low-voltage power is typically supplied by a component called a DC-to-DC converter. It takes high-voltage power from the main battery pack, steps it down, and uses it to charge the 12-volt battery and/or run electronics directly.
But the EX60 doesn’t have one DC-to-DC converter, it has two, with one on each side. The systems are interlinked, so as long as one converter is functioning, the car can get 12-volt power for its emergency systems. Because they are each located inboard and under the rear seats, it would take an extraordinarily disastrous crash to knock both out.
“What happens if you knock both out? Well, frankly speaking, at that point you can’t [tell] what kind of car it was. It’s a very protected area,” he said.
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