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Tesla Inc. and at least eight other carmakers are recalling millions of cars in China over safety concerns with their door handles, a major step to address flaws that have led to vehicle entrapment and multiple fatalities.

More than 4 million vehicles are affected as part of the broad crackdown, one of the most sweeping recalls ever in the world’s biggest auto market. Tesla accounts for the largest share, with just under 3 million vehicles included in the action announced Friday.

The Tesla vehicles have electrically controlled handles that can stop working in some crashes, which “could hinder occupants from quickly opening the doors to escape and impede rescue efforts by those outside the vehicle, posing a safety hazard,” according to a statement from China’s State Administration for Market Regulation. As part of the recall, the carmaker will update software to automatically lower the windows after an accident and will affix warning labels showing where the emergency door releases are located.

Vehicles designed with flush, electric handles have been involved in a series of incidents in which occupants have been trapped inside their cars after the vehicles lost power, including after a crash. In several instances, occupants of Tesla vehicles survived the initial impact of a high-speed crash only to die or sustain serious injury from subsequent fires after being unable to exit.

Bloomberg News has reported extensively on the modern door systems, uncovering at least 15 deaths in a dozen incidents in which occupants or rescuers were unable to open the doors of a Tesla that had crashed and caught fire. Bloomberg also reported late last year that chief executive officer Elon Musk insisted on electric doors even after potential safety concerns were raised internally.

China has taken a particular interest in the topic following fiery crashes involving Xiaomi Corp. vehicles, becoming the first country in the world to outlaw the design when it banned concealed door handles on electric vehicles earlier this year. The country has also been introducing regulations for driver-assistance technology, batteries, and other standards to try to improve the safety of cars at a time when Chinese automakers have been developing cars in roughly half of the time as legacy carmakers.

This marks one of the largest vehicle recalls for the same kind of quality issue in China, according to Li Yanwei, an adviser to the China Automobile Dealers Association.

After Tesla, Xiaomi accounted for the next highest number of vehicles recalled in Friday’s action, with 390,435 of its SU7 electric sedans. Zhejiang Leapmotor Technology Co. Ltd. is recalling 371,200 vehicles, according to statements from the market regulator. The total number of EVs being recalled for door handle related safety risks from the nine carmakers reached about 4.27 million affected.

Tesla on Friday also recalled about 2.7 million vehicles to shore up its means for monitoring drivers using its driver-assistance technology and ensuring they pay attention to traffic and avoid collisions.

In the U.S., auto safety regulators said last month that they would begin the process to impose a new federal rule addressing concerns over unsafe door handles. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also probing certain Tesla Model Y vehicles over complaints of door-related entrapment, and a U.S. lawmaker has introduced legislation to require manual door releases in new cars and means for first responders to gain access to vehicles when power is lost.

Craig Trudell contributed to this article.

It’s back-to-school shopping season, which means parents are spending money on new crayons and notebooks. Parents are calculating just how much they can afford to spend on school supplies, what children can reuse from the year before, and what on teachers’ lists will have to be abandoned.

The cost of school supplies has risen nearly 8% since last year, according to a report from the left-leaning groups the Century Foundation and Groundwork Collaborative, which pointed out that the makers of such school staples as Elmer’s glue and Sharpies and Expo markers, Mead and Five Star notebooks, and Logitech headphones have all spoken publicly about raising their prices because of the Trump administration’s tariffs on imported goods.

The days of students making an annual trip to the office supply store with their back-to-school shopping lists in hand have gotten an internet-age makeover. Today, more than a million classroom teachers have posted the items they want their students to buy to the website TeacherLists.com. The average total spending to buy the whole list? $91.55, for an average of 15 items, for those who shop at Target and Walmart, the website’s vice president, Elizabeth Lamport, said. With one click, parents can add all the items on the list to their online shopping carts at stores such as Amazon, Staples, or Office Depot, and buy the whole kit with another click.

Princess Heard, a single mom of two in Roswell, Ga., starts putting away money for fall back-to-school supplies as soon as her kids come home from their last day of school each spring. Heard, who works for a health insurance company, budgeted that she would need $200 this year to outfit her kids with new backpacks and the items from their teachers’ lists. She took online surveys for cash to make the money.

When she took her kids to Target the day before school started, she kept a calculator open on her phone, tallying as they put what they needed into the cart. She hit her $200 maximum before they finished their lists. “The deals weren’t as good as they normally were, in previous years,” she said. “We didn’t get as many supplies as I normally do. … Usually I’m able to get everything.”

Heard ended up deciding not to buy any of the classroom supplies the teachers requested, like wipes and tissues. She’ll bring some in later in the school year, she said.

In a Good Morning America-Ipsos poll conducted late July, two-thirds of parents said back-to-school shopping is more expensive this year, and nearly nobody said it’s cheaper. They said they’d spend an average of $118 per child on school supplies, and a total of more than $800 on sports gear, clothes, books, technology, and other back-to-school shopping.

Some of the items most commonly on teachers’ lists are relatively cheap. Target, which said in a news release that 95% of its school supplies are at or below last year’s retail prices, is selling 24-packs of Crayola crayons, double packs of Elmer’s glue, two big pink erasers, or pocket folders with prongs for 50 cents each right now.

Annie Redlin, a nurse in Rochester, Minn., who shares parenting ideas on her website, asked her three sons to gather up all their leftover supplies and dump them out on the floor ahead of their first day of school next week. She called out each item on their teachers’ shopping lists, asking if they already had it in the pile.

“We do not need all new markers. … Some of those notebooks have two pages used; we rip out the pages,” Redlin said. “Seventy-five percent of the things I’m sending back to school this year are reused, which is really helpful for the budget. … They’ve never once said, ‘Mom, I don’t have new crayons like my friends.’”

Her husband, a physical education teacher at the boys’ school, took them shopping for what was left on their list: crayons for the first-grader, new binders and folders, a pencil holder for the sixth-grader. He walked out having spent about $35 for the three kids.

“Truthfully, I feel a little bit of a sense of relief,” Redlin said. “Life feels really expensive right now, with groceries and clothes for three growing kids. It was really nice to not feel stressed about how much money I spent on school supplies.”

In Alexandria, Va., 14 public elementary schools have posted their supply lists on TeacherLists.com. The average second-grader is asked to bring 13 items at an average cost of $61.87 at Target.

But many families end up spending more. Several of the Alexandria schools’ lists, for example, include the same clear plastic pencil case, selling for $4. If your kid wants the one with a Minion or Pokémon or a Star Wars figure on it, it’s $7. Upgrade from clear to pink or blue, and it’s $10. Add a wavy fidget design, it’s $14.

Zoie Hoffman, a math tutor in Las Vegas, had to buy school supplies for her first-grade twins for the first time this year. It cost about $200 to buy everything on the school list: scissors, crayons, markers, colored paper, cardstock, paper towels, baby wipes.

She tries to save money, including by looking for high-quality backpacks and water bottles that she won’t need to replace for years. But she also bears in mind that most of her children’s education is free.

“My mindset is, we’re going to public school, and you know, this is just part of it.”