2020 TESLA MODEL 3 — Complaint #2118062
Open-data reference.
NHTSA Complaint about LATCHES/LOCKS/LINKAGES:DOORS:LATCH:EMERGENCY MECHANICAL RELEASE filed August 7, 2025
NHTSA complaint #2118062 (ODI reference 11678986) concerns a 2020 TESLA MODEL 3 and was filed on August 7, 2025. The owner reports the failure occurred on August 7, 2025. The report was geocoded to North Carolina based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as latches/locks/linkages:doors:latch:emergency mechanical release, one of NHTSA's standardized taxonomy codes used to group defect patterns across make, model, and year.
The filer flagged the following severity indicators: crash: no, fire: no, injuries: 0, fatalities: 0. No crash, fire, or fatality was associated with this report, which places it in the early-warning stream rather than the priority-review stream. Because a VIN was supplied, this complaint is tied to a specific vehicle and not just a model-year cohort.
Individual complaints are consumer-submitted and unverified by NHTSA engineers — the agency's role at this stage is to collect, index, and make them searchable. What matters for federal action is the pattern: when many owners of the same TESLA MODEL 3 cohort independently describe similar latches/locks/linkages:doors:latch:emergency mechanical release failures, defect investigators have grounds to open a PE and request manufacturer data. Related filings for the same vehicle and component appear below, and the detail page for the full 2020 TESLA MODEL 3 shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.
Complaint Description
Essentially, I find the lack of emergency, unpowered door release for the back doors a little concerning. There is no way to open the door in the event that all power to the door latch fails. Even in newer models (at least of 3/Y/Cybertruck, that i know of) the emergency release is buried under the cupholder liner in the rear seat. Here is a youtube video showing a homebrew retrofit. It seems like something like this should probably be provided to owners of this model of car. The internals of the door seem to make this feasible. [XXX] The front seats, on the other hand, have an easily accessed and intuitive emergency door release. I imagine that the rear seats differ from this model because of child safety locks. Just removing all emergency handles from the door seems like a pretty bad solution. I further understand that there are situations in which even an emergency door release will fail to open the door, and a glass break device is probably the ultimate recourse to thi
Complaint Details
| NHTSA Complaint ID | 2118062 |
| ODI Number | 11678986 |
| Date Filed | August 7, 2025 |
| Failure Date | August 7, 2025 |
| VIN | 5YJ3E1EB6LF |
Source: NHTSA Vehicle Complaints Database. Component taxonomy and severity codes are standardized by NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation.
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