Flush door handles are the car industry’s latest safety problem - Ars Technica
Flush door handles are the car industry’s latest safety problem - Ars Technica
arstechnica.com
Flush door handles are the car industry’s latest safety problem
12 comments
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During heavy rain, flush-fit door handles have short-circuited, trapping people in their cars.
This whole thing roots back to Elon Musk being a twat.
He had a habit, in the early days of his involvement with Tesla, of demanding some particular change to the design (and being able to make it stick because of his position) because it would be "more awesome" in his mind. There were a bunch of them, which wasted millions of dollars even back in those much smaller-scale days, and the whole "electronic door handles" thing is that. It's obviously worse in pretty much every way (among them cost, reliability, and safety), but he thought it would be awesome, and he's a self-important blockhead who can't hear any criticism, and so here we are.
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Door handles are a safety feature to open a stuck door with force from the outside. This has been common knowledge (at least in the German car industry) for years. Google some pictures of expensive German cars like Porsche 911, VW Phaeton, BMW 7 and others. Almost all of them have door handles.
Would the designers imagine it without handles and clean lines? You bet. Google Audi Design study: no handles at all.
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Why do cars keep taking 2 steps forward, one step backwards?
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Money. Charge for useless features, then charge more to let people buy out of them.
Fuck the following:
Flush door handles
Tablet screens that are not integrated into the dashboard
Motorized air vents
Glove box doors that require using the infotainment to open
A lack of keyholes or metal keys for at least one door
Cars that cannot be put into neutral without power
All the goddamn telemetry that you can't shut off
Subscriptions for basic features
Aaos in any car
Gear shifters that are entirely non intuitive
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It gives them something else to fix and make money on when it breaks. Traditional headlight bulbs are like $10-20 and easy to replace, but newer LED headlight harnesses and their replacement can be hundreds.
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LEDs have so many superior properties and don’t burn out nearly as often though. I have a car with automatic matrix high beams and it’s a godsend for night driving. I would give credit where it’s due.
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Because there are no innovations left to make, the design of a car is pretty well established.
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12 comments
As pointed out in one of the many other threads about this article — mechanical flush handles aren’t the problem. Motor-driven electronic handles are.