Consumer Reports bought a top-of-the-line Tesla Motors Inc. Model S to test, but one of the electric car’s door handles malfunctioned before the influential U.S. magazine could put the car through its paces.

The Model S has retractable handles that lie flush with the door panel when not in use. A signal from an electronic key fob pops out the door handles whenever in close proximity to the car.

Only it didn’t on the Model S P85D that Consumer Reports bought for $127,000 — the most the magazine said it has ever shelled out for a car. The door issue surfaced 27 days after the purchase, and though there were already 2,300 miles on the odometer, Consumer Reports said it hadn’t yet begun its “formal test regimen.”

The “fancy retractable door handles refused to let us in,” it said. There was no way to open the driver’s door from the outside, the magazine said.

Consumer Reports had bestowed top honors to the 2013 Model S.

The good news? Consumer Reports didn’t have to take the car to the dealership: Tesla TSLA, +4.42% makes house calls (a perk available to all customers, not just the magazine). The company sent a repairman to fix the stuck handle the next day, and the car was ready to go through Consumer Reports’ “formal test regimen,” the magazine said. The repair took about two hours and was covered under the warranty, it said.

Retractable door handles are one of the Model S’s most distinctive features, but they’ve also been somewhat of a sore point for owners. Consumer Reports said that doors, latches, and locks are the biggest “trouble areas” for Tesla owners, and “the Model S has far higher than average rates of such problems,” the magazine said.

Most problems can be diagnosed and fixed without the owner coming in for service using the car’s connectivity and over-the-air software updates, a Tesla spokeswoman said in an e-mail Monday.

“In instances when hardware, like the door handle, need to be replaced, we strive to make it painless for a customer to get their Model S serviced. Every fix is an opportunity for us to learn and apply towards making owning a Model S a great experience,” she said in a statement.

Earlier this month, at a conference call with analysts following Tesla’s first-quarter results, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk mentioned the Model S’s door problems in the context of getting Tesla’s next model, the Model X, ready for sale in the second half of the year without any lingering issues.

“(Customers) don’t want to have buckling door issues with the X. We want to iron everything out and make sure it’s good and then deliver at high volume,” Musk told analysts.

The Model X, an SUV, will have a couple of distinctive features of its own, chief among them its “falcon wings” which, unlike the gull-wing doors of yesteryear, are double-hinged in order to better negotiate tight parking spaces.