Rescueability — The Missing Principle in Automotive Design

Cadillac Escalade IQ EV. This 9,100-pound EV has a dual-stacked battery in a solid casing. The vehicle looks like a gasoline vehicle because of all the air vents. The intakes are functional — a fan must operate to keep the battery pack cool in hot weather, which can drain the battery and put the pack into fault mode. The intakes are actually smaller on the gasoline version. This is a first for an EV, and the clues first responders used to look for are now meaningless.   

Cars are built to survive a crash. Whether the people inside can get out afterward, whether rescuers can get in and cut the high-voltage power, whether the vehicle can even be identified from the outside — none of that is a standard design requirement yet. Newark Fire Department Battalion Chief Steven LaPenta and WSL Consulting CEO William S. Lerner have a word for this gap: Rescueability. This piece looks at what electronic door handles, laminated glass, oversized batteries, and the absence of any external identification mean for people trying to reach a crash scene — and why rescueability may be the automotive industry's next unavoidable question.

By Sang Min Han _ han@autoelectronics.co.kr
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We Already Knew This

In August 2024, a Mercedes EQE caught fire without warning in the underground parking garage of an apartment complex in Incheon, South Korea. No one — not the owner, not the building manager, not the fire department — had any indication the car was about to burn. The fire spread through the entire garage within minutes, contaminating roughly 600 vehicles. Residents who had evacuated came back to find children complaining of eye irritation, older residents of skin irritation.
A year and a half has passed since then. In that time, the problem of electronic door handles has surfaced in country after country. In the United States, a 22-year-old called 911 from inside a Tesla Model 3, saying he couldn't breathe, that he was trapped. He kicked and punched the laminated glass. It didn't break. His family is now suing. China, for its part, will effectively ban fully concealed electronic door handles starting January 1, 2027, requiring a mechanical release that works even when the car loses power.
Incheon. The United States. China. Three different countries, three different incidents — but they point at the same question. Cars are built for the crash. Are they built for what comes after?
In interviews with AEM in June and July, Newark Fire Department Battalion Chief Steven LaPenta and WSL Consulting CEO William S. Lerner gave the same answer, independently. The core issue isn't EVs, and it isn't batteries. It's that cars weren't designed with this risk in mind at all.



What Is Rescueability?

There's a word both men reach for. Rescueability. It isn't a standard term, and it doesn't exist in automotive engineering vocabulary — but nothing else quite captures the problem. "Crash tests are built around the moment a person hits a wall," LaPenta said. "Whether you can get out of the car afterward, whether a rescuer can get in — that's not tested."
What is rescueability?
▶ Can occupants get themselves out after a crash?▶ Can rescuers reach the interior quickly?▶ Can the vehicle be identified immediately, from the outside?▶ Can high voltage be safely cut off?▶ Does the vehicle's own design get in the way of a rescue?
These questions are being raised around the world in one form or another. Not one of the five currently exists as a formal requirement in any international vehicle safety standard.



Lucid battery pack. Sold globally and produced in the US and Saudi Arabia, the individual cells sit in an open casing integrated on top of the vehicle's skateboard-style underfloor platform. According to Lerner, off-gassing can occur during a fire, and cells have in some cases been observed ejecting at distances of up to 50 feet.

Typical behavior after an EV fire. The vehicle can reignite at any time for up to three months. Off-gassing can continue, and first responders and the public often assume that if they don't see fire, they're safe. They are not.



What No One Asks For Doesn't Get Designed

Why has this concept never made it to the design table? Euro NCAP doesn't score for it. Neither does IIHS. Neither does NHTSA. No consumer asks a dealer, "Can I get out of this car if something happens?" No investor prices it into a company's valuation.
"When engineers are optimizing for aerodynamics, styling, crash safety, cost — rescueability isn't in that conversation," LaPenta said. "I can tell you about the specific problems I've run into trying to get someone out of a particular vehicle. But nobody's asking."
The gap isn't limited to cars. Lerner has led the first comprehensive risk assessment ever conducted across the entire portfolio of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — five airports including JFK, Newark, and LaGuardia, the George Washington Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, and parking infrastructure holding more than 120,000 vehicles. The assessment centered on what lithium-ion risk means for infrastructure used by roughly 600 million people a year. He's also recently taken on a new consulting role covering electric aircraft, eVTOLs, and drones. The same blind spot that's showing up in cars, in other words, is starting to show up in airports and large-scale infrastructure too.
"Nobody asks a fire department how to design a hundred-story building before it goes up," LaPenta said. He argues that a rescue specialist should be in the room from day one whenever an automaker is developing a new platform. Lerner arrived at the same conclusion from a different direction: "Before you bury a high-voltage disconnect somewhere Chief LaPenta can't reach it, bring him in and ask: does this placement work? That's it. It costs nothing. Rescue professionals will tell you that for free."
Laminated glass is one of the more concrete things this gap has produced. Adopted for noise reduction and UV blocking, it doesn't shatter under a center punch the way tempered glass does — it just cracks. An occupant's emergency escape tool is useless against it. A firefighter's cutting tools work, but the few minutes it takes them to arrive can be the difference between life and death.



Rescue Starts With Identification

The rescueability gap applies to every vehicle. In an EV, it carries a different weight entirely, because of residual high-voltage energy, thermal runaway, reignition, and toxic gas.
Lithium-ion battery fires burn at 3,000 to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit — roughly 1,650 to 2,760 Celsius. A fire that looks fully extinguished can reignite anywhere from a few days to as long as three months later, according to LaPenta. In Incheon, the vehicle was fully engulfed within seconds of ignition — no window for rescuers to reassess their approach, their tactics, or their containment radius.
"If we get to the scene and we can't extricate, can't cut, don't have the gear to protect ourselves from the toxic gas — what do you do? You let the car burn," LaPenta said.
The single most important piece of information for a responding crew isn't the size of the fire. It's what the vehicle is. Gasoline, hybrid, or electric changes everything about how a crew approaches, where they position themselves, what protective equipment they need, how they cool and isolate the scene, and even how the vehicle gets towed and stored afterward. Not knowing the propulsion type means walking into a scene without knowing what kind of risk you're actually facing.
And increasingly, that's hard to tell from the outside. Some EVs look nearly identical to their gasoline counterparts, and there's often no way to confirm which one you're looking at until you're already close.
"A blocked-off radiator grille, no exhaust, a blue badge — those used to be the visual cues," Lerner said. "Aerodynamics, unified design language, brand consistency — all of that is erasing the difference between a gas car and an EV. And with more platform-sharing, the same body is often sold as gas, hybrid, and electric at once."
For a crew arriving on scene, the visual cues that used to exist are quietly disappearing. LaPenta's petition to NHTSA doesn't try to cover rescueability as a whole. What he asked for first is the most basic layer: external identification.



What They Found at the Dealership

LaPenta and Lerner went together to a dealership to look at a Cadillac Escalade IQ. From the outside, the gas version and the EV were nearly indistinguishable — a marker near the turn signal was the only difference. The radiator grille, once a visual giveaway when blocked off, was actually more open on the EV, to feed the battery cooling fans. Even that cue didn't hold up.
The interior was worse. The door handles looked conventional but were fully electronic. There was no manual switch to open the frunk. Reaching the high-voltage disconnect meant removing a sliding tray covering the battery compartment — and the label marking it was black text embossed on black plastic, nearly impossible to read. "I'm trained to do this job, and I still couldn't find where the disconnect was," LaPenta said.
Lerner described a similar experience from his history with GM. About a decade ago, a GM battery executive asked him to review the emergency response guide for the Cadillac Lyriq. He suggested two things: that first responders to any lithium-ion incident involving the vehicle be monitored for 24 hours, and that the guide state plainly that the vehicle could reignite within that window. Neither suggestion was adopted, he said.
The Escalade IQ weighs roughly 4,127 kilograms and carries a 205 kWh battery. Lerner and LaPenta see its dual-stacked battery architecture as raising new questions around thermal propagation that haven't been fully worked through. The cooling fan system is its own variable — a fan or power failure could add complications for battery management and vehicle function, and potentially affect the availability of some electronic features. Neither man frames this as an indictment of the manufacturer. They see it instead as a gap that exists across the industry, because no one has yet asked for rescueability as a design target. So what would an OEM actually get out of taking it on?



What OEMs Stand to Gain

Building rescueability into the design process isn't a burden for an automaker. It's closer to an opening. The first thing on offer is brand trust. Volvo has spent decades building "safety" into its brand identity — rescueability is territory nobody has claimed yet.
"An OEM that brings rescue specialists into the design process early earns the right to say, 'we put consumer safety first,'" LaPenta said. "That's a public safety issue, but it's also worth something as a brand." Add to that reduced legal exposure, an ESG narrative around first-responder safety, and a head start on whatever regulation eventually follows. Lerner keeps coming back to cost. He says this doesn't require new parts or a redesign — just asking an existing supplier to add one more component. "The cost is basically nothing," he said. "Rescue professionals would do this for free." So how do the two of them think this actually gets built?



The Silverado emblem at the rear of the vehicle. The Chevrolet bowtie has grown dramatically in size, while the model name has shrunk. This is the current trend: highlight the brand, not the vehicle's specific attributes, powertrain, or propulsion.  



Information as the New Safety Feature

What Lerner and LaPenta are pushing isn't a new part. It's a different way of thinking about the problem.
"In these situations, seconds matter, and first responders need the information to respond as safely and efficiently as possible. What we're proposing, in the end, is information," Lerner said. He frames the approach not as a "safety feature" but as an information layer. One concept he's built out, drawing on a patent portfolio of more than twenty filings, works like this: a high-brightness LED, invisible under normal conditions, hidden somewhere on the exterior of the vehicle. When a crash or a battery fault is detected, it lights up, signaling propulsion type through color and pattern. A later stage of the concept would push battery capacity, state of charge, occupant count, and the location of high- and low-voltage disconnects directly to a responder's wearable device or to surrounding infrastructure.
"The moment a bystander or an officer calls it in and says there's a problem, and the lights are flashing orange and blue — dispatch already knows it's an EV," Lerner said. "That information reaches the crew before they're even on scene."
This is one of several possible approaches Lerner is proposing, not a finished or proven system. How rescueability actually gets implemented could take any number of technical paths, and this is only one starting point among them.



The 2027 BMW X5's electrically operated door opener — a small fin-like protrusion on the B-pillar.



What China Recognized First

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will effectively ban fully concealed electronic door handles starting January 1, 2027, requiring every new passenger vehicle to carry a mechanical, power-independent release. It marks the first time the world's largest EV market has formally acknowledged the risk of relying on electronic handles alone. Manufacturers like Mercedes, which have rolled out electronic handles across most of their new lineup, now have to engineer a separate door for the Chinese market. Lerner expects this to reach other markets before long, Korea included. "This decision is going to ripple out to other markets eventually," he said. "There's a moment coming where a customer asks a salesperson, why does the new car I'm buying have an old-fashioned handle?"
Even so, no international regulation requires rescueability itself. There's no standardized egress test, no rescue-performance test, no standardized test for electronic door handles, no rescue-oriented standard for laminated glass. Japan NCAP made a limited attempt to include a door-opening score, but it hasn't gained traction as a global design benchmark.



The Petition, and Its Limits

The first attempt to fill this gap was filed in Washington, D.C. on July 1.
LaPenta submitted a rulemaking petition, in a personal capacity, that was formally received by the U.S. Department of Transportation and NHTSA's Office of Chief Counsel. It calls for a standardized external marking system that would let any new vehicle's propulsion type be identified immediately from outside. The petition cites NTSB findings of 15 separate high-voltage battery reignitions across three investigated EV fires, along with a Washington state survey in which 62 percent of tow operators had no system for confirming whether a wrecked vehicle was electric.
A petition doesn't automatically become regulation. The formal U.S. rulemaking process can take years after filing, and rejection is a real possibility. Even so, the petition itself isn't a small thing.
As LaPenta put it: "If NHTSA takes this up, it sends a signal to automakers that they need to do better, and it tells the public and first responders that this risk is being taken seriously. If it's rejected, it just means things stay the way they are."
Accepted or rejected, the fact that external identification of vehicle propulsion type has been formally placed on the U.S. federal rulemaking agenda is, in itself, the significance of this petition.
The broader question of how rescuers and vehicles interact is surfacing in autonomous driving policy too. In July 2026, NHTSA issued a public Call to Action after repeated incidents of driverless vehicles blocking fire trucks and ambulances, or failing to recognize flashing lights, smoke, fire, and traffic control equipment. It's a sign that rescueability is expanding beyond EV fires and electronic door handles into a systems requirement the whole future of mobility will eventually have to address.
Rescueability isn't likely to translate into new passenger-vehicle regulation anytime soon. But as with much of the industry's history, regulation has tended to follow voluntary moves by companies willing to go first. That's roughly what happened with crash safety. It's roughly what happened with ADAS.



The interior of the Dodge Charger. The EV Charger Daytona and the gasoline Charger Sixpack share the same body and door structure. The front doors have exterior electric door openers, and all four doors open via electric push buttons. The front seats have a manual release lever hidden below a panel, but no separate manual release device was identified for the rear seats. If the vehicle loses battery power, rear-seat occupants could face significant difficulty exiting.



Who Is the Last User?

Cars keep getting smarter, quieter, faster. The question of how to rescue a human being after a crash still sits outside the design conversation. The moment something goes wrong, the last user of that vehicle is a first responder — someone who has to handle it in ways its engineers never considered. In the dark. Rolled over. In the rain. With gloved hands, facing thousands of degrees of heat.
"A first responder's life is worth exactly as much as the life of the person inside the car," Lerner said. "They're somebody's father, somebody's son, somebody's grandchild too." LaPenta adds the harder part: "If we get to the scene and we can't extricate, can't cut — that car has to burn. Those people are going to die."
Rescueability may eventually take the shape of quantifiable metrics — door-opening time, external identifiability, access time to high-voltage disconnects, time to complete a rescue procedure. It isn't a new technology. It may simply be one of the most basic obligations a car has to its occupants, all the way to the last moment. Cars are designed to avoid a crash. But not every crash can be avoided.
When one happens, is the car designed to let someone be saved? Is yours?

AEM(오토모티브일렉트로닉스매거진)

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