Potential safety hazard caused by lock-in condition. I have the Satin Nickel version of this deadbolt which uses the same mechanism. I had the first one for about 2 months, then the mechanism jammed and the deadbolt was left in the half thrown position. In this position, the manual turn knob became inoperable. The only way to open the lock was to exit through another door and use the key to force it open. After that the lock seemed to operate normally. Smarthome was great in replacing the lock with a replacement. A month later, the replacement lock did the same thing. I have the auto lock feature set. After I enter the house, I will manually throw the bolt to avoid having the lock automatically lock, thus extending the battery life. On one instance, I happened to throw the bolt manually while the bolt was going through its auto-lock sequence. Right after that, I noticed that the bolt was left in the half thrown position. Once again, I had to exit through another door and use the key to force the lock open. After that the lock seemed to work normally. I contacted Kwikset and apparently they are aware of the situation. They said that the remedy is to force the lock open or closed using the inside manual turn lever. Unfortunately, the turn lever is too short to provide the necessary leverage to do this, thus creating a "lock-in" safety hazard. I did mention to Kwikset that this method of force opening needs to be added to their instructions. Unfortunately, Kwikset did not take my concerns seriously. With the first lock set, I recall that as I was closing the door, the auto-lock mechanism had activated and the deadbolt hit the strike off center and had to retry three times before it locked. It wasn't until the next morning that I realized that I was unable to unlock the door. Seems like this lock-in condition is created when the deadbolt mechanism is unable to complete its locking cycle without interference.