A congressional bill just landed to regulate electronic and pop-out door handles on new cars, treating a design trend as a safety issue. The move targets the exact kind of theatrical hardware that Tesla, BMW, and others leaned into as differentiation. If it passes, you're looking at a hard reset on how manufacturers approach entry systems—function over form, cost over character.

The SAFE Exit Act specifically targets flush electronic door handles after claims of 15 deaths, with Tesla as the obvious target. The bill frames emergency egress as a design flaw, not user error. Whether this becomes regulation or gets buried in committee says everything about how Washington handles EV safety theater.

Tesla's lobbying for faster autonomous vehicle approval in Europe, but there's a problem: Full Self-Driving still can't reliably detect motorcyclists in its sensor stack. It's the kind of detail regulators should probably care about before rubber-stamping a system that claims to be ready for public roads.