Regulators are banning doors that won't open. BMW's iX3 just built one
Doors have quietly become the most argued-about hardware on a modern car.
For most of this year the argument has run in one direction. Handles that hide, latches that need electricity, doors that stay shut when the car has stopped working: regulators in Beijing and Washington have decided that a door refusing to open is a defect worth legislating against. BMW has gone the other way. On the Neue Klasse, starting with the iX3, the car can now decide not to let you out yet.
How the iX3's Exit Warning delays the door release
The iX3 uses side radars to scan the space alongside a parked car, and if a cyclist or another vehicle is closing in, the electronic lock holds the door release until the hazard has passed. Exit Warning is a system BMW has fitted for years, but until now it only flashed and chimed. Pull the interior handle at the wrong moment and nothing happens.
BMW cites figures from the German Insurance Association showing 392 dooring crashes in Berlin in 2024, just under 8 percent of all bicycle collisions in the city. The system is standard on the iX3, including the entry-level iX3 40, and reaches the i3, X5 and 7 Series next.
What BMW's emergency steering intervention adds
Emergency steering intervention can steer the iX3 around an obstacle inside its own lane, and BMW claims no rival currently offers it. The examples the company gives are a pedestrian stepping out from between parked cars and a cyclist lost in low light. It can also edge the car away from a vehicle closing in from the side when there is room to do that safely.
The Emergency Brake Assistant now accounts for evasive steering and reacts to animals as well. If the Attentiveness Assistant concludes the driver is incapacitated, it brings the car to a stop, switches on the hazards and places an eCall by itself. The driver can override all of it.
Why China and the US are regulating electronic door handles
China's new safety standard bans hidden pop-out handles and electronic-only door releases from 2027, and more than four million cars have already been recalled there, close to three million of them Teslas. In the United States, the NHTSA has started work on its own door handle rules.
Europe has nothing comparable, and that is the quiet part of the story. The continent where the iX3 collected five stars under Euro NCAP's tougher 2026 protocol still has no rule governing how a door must open once the electronics stop.
The Dutch Reach is already rule 239 of the UK Highway Code
The Dutch Reach means opening the door with the hand furthest from it, so your shoulder turns and your eyes follow the movement out into the road. It is written into the UK Highway Code at rule 239 and taught as standard to learner drivers in the Netherlands.
It costs nothing, needs no sensors and works in a 30-year-old car. BMW has now built a radar to do that same job for drivers who were never taught it.
AutoNext Take
The obvious objection is that a door which sometimes ignores you is exactly what the rest of the world is trying to outlaw, and it deserves a straight answer. A brief hold, with the car parked, the electronics awake and a cyclist visibly arriving, is not the failure that killed people. That one is a car with no power, no mechanical release and an occupant who cannot find the emergency catch. Blurring the two would be a lazy way to talk yourself out of a feature that prevents a genuinely common crash.
But the fix and the failure share a component, and being good at the first does not answer for the second. So here is the bet: within two model cycles, active door-hold becomes a Euro NCAP scoring line and a mechanical interior release becomes a legal minimum in Europe, and carmakers will have to show both. BMW has done the interesting half early. The boring half, a handle that works when nothing else does, is the one Europe still has not bothered to write down.
