- The rear doors have no mechanical backup, which is where the problem starts.
- Jeep’s solution stores enough energy for two or three releases after power loss.
- A physical key cylinder adds another layer, but only on one door in the car.
Door handles are becoming a more prominent topic than ever before in the automotive industry. Automakers across the globe have leaned into electronic latches over the last decade and a half, and issues with them are prompting a discussion on safety.
More: New Toyota Highlander Goes All-Electric, But Its Door Handles Don’t Fully Trust Electricity
That has led Jeep designers to a solution for a problem that simply didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago: supercapacitors that retain enough energy to release a door even after the battery dies.
The new Cherokee, along with other Stellantis products, uses electric door latches. The front doors include a manual backup release for dead-battery scenarios. The rear doors do not. In a serious accident, that could make exiting the back seat genuinely difficult. Jeep thought of that, though.
What Powers The Handle If The Battery Fails?
Jeep’s interior design chief, Ryan Nagode, confirmed to Carscoops that each door handle button contains a small capacitor, a component that stores and releases electrical charge almost instantly. Should the battery die, whether during normal operation or in the event of an accident, those capacitors could be life-saving.
“They actually store energy for two or three cycles of hitting the button,” he told us. “If the complete system is dead, there’s actually a little bit of energy left to unlock that door. So there’s redundancy in the system, and anytime you see one of our vehicles, that redundancy is baked into it,” Nagode explained.
Head of exterior design Vince Galante backed up that idea of redundant safety, adding to the discussion, “We have seen a lot in the news about electronic handles, but a lot of that is with recessed door handles. Ours aren’t like that. They’re actually a pocket in the door that you can grab and open in the event of an emergency.”
That’s not where Jeep stopped thinking about safety, though. After all, what good is a pocket door handle when the latch itself is electric and without power?
To that end, engineers added a classic lock cylinder to the outside of the driver’s door handle that can allow the key-fob holder to gain access even with a dead battery. It’s another backup layer that should improve safety.
That all said, we’ve seen accidents that went from bad to tragic in the matter of 60 seconds or less because of questionable door handle design. Based on other solutions we’ve documented, this one from Stellantis might not be the very best, but it’s certainly a move in the right direction.
