Evolution of car door handles over the decades
newatlas.com24 points by andsoitis 4 days ago
24 points by andsoitis 4 days ago
I was expecting some mention of the Dutch Reach (internal handles that are sort of backwards to force car users to look in the direction of possible approaching pedestrians or bicycles behind them while opening their door), but I guess the article's focus wasn't quite on that type of detail.
The mechanical flush mount car door handles are because shaping that divot into the steel is much more complicated then punching a hole, and especially aluminum is many times more complicated and expensive. Audi was showing off their technical expertise with creasing aluminum with unlimited money in their bodywork before dieselgate, and that was pretty much peak for car body technology.
This article contains a nice chart of different types: https://www.theautopian.com/what-is-the-goat-door-handle-des...
This is a great video by SuperfastMatt on the engineering behind and evolution of the Tesla door handle.
Even in the new version it seems like there is no fallback method for a failure.
I am bemused every time I use Uber and the car has some flush-mounted door handle that I have to figure out. When exiting the car and closing the door, I end up leaving fingerprints I would not have left if the handle had been designed by someone who had been in a car before.
agreed on fingerprints, though i bet the rationale is coefficient of drag, not lack of experience with various door handle designs.
in the article, it shows a Magna-Steyr handle on a Mercedes Gelaendewagen, which looks like those on the Ineos Grenadier, and not very different than the ones that Ford uses on various trucks.
that contrasts with those on Audi and BMW evs, for examples i see often, where the CoD is a stated spec for ev shoppers, and the handles have motion to them, but are flush (but not Tesla vanishingly flush). Weirdly, some Porsches (intimately related to Audi...just read the shared parts) use flush handles and some the protruding handles with an actual handle.
i admittedly pay an unusual amount of attention to car componentry, sort of a hobby really.
The additional drag is negligible. People have been producing "racing doors" with handles for decades. They focus on cutting all the other features of the door like weight and mechanical complexity instead. It's an even more irrelevant consideration for consumers, who could save far more fuel by changing how they drive.
Flush handles exist as brand differentiators. They're a "futuristic" feel-good feature that consumers want, like engine noise, tablets, and colorful dashboards.
It's about more than just one thing alone. E.g.
https://media.landrover.com/new-range-rover-sport-press-kit-...
https://usa.infinitinews.com/en-US/releases/2025-qx80-press-...
> It's an even more irrelevant consideration for consumers, who could save far more fuel by changing how they drive.
These are not in conflict. The energy you save from drag stacks with the energy you save from "learning how to drive".
Yeah, but making opening doors a puzzle to solve is an incredibly terrible trade off.
And that’s before we consider the other aspects of these door handle designs that make the cars a death trap.
The death trap claims come from the internal affordance, which seems to be totally independent from the exterior one.
I have a car with a "novel" handle situation. (Ford Mustand Mach E) The door is operable from the inside with a dead battery. Maybe this particular one isn't as challenging as some of the other designs, but calling it a "puzzle" definitely overstates the case. I think it took me maybe 4 seconds to figure out the first time.
They add a tiny bit to the efficiency and/or range, they look cool (e.g. serve a gee-whiz marketing purpose), and safety evaluations in the markets where they still exist don't penalize them -- up until now they've had very little against them.
Maybe as legal and reputational backlash spreads the pros will not outweigh the cons. But someone designing a car a decade ago, marketed towards early adopter types, would have had no reason not to.
And I say this as someone who hates these handles designs personally.
I'm not presenting it as a conflict. I'm presenting it as a revealed preference of how much consumers actually try to optimize fuel use. There's significant reductions to be had completely for free (or even with savings by purchasing smaller, cheaper vehicles). And yes, the savings from flush handles are too small to show up in the MPG number.
All of the things you mention are considerations that every automaker considers. Product design engineering is simply an exercise in weighting those factors, among many others.
I'm saying flush handles aren't about drag, not passing judgement on whether those other factors are bad.
Drag is absolutely one of those factors. Yes, it only contributes a small amount to the overall drag profile of the vehicle, but a vehicle is a sum of its parts ultimately.
It's not a meaningful factor in decisionmaking. Manufacturers went on an aerodynamics optimization spree in the 80s after the fuel crisis. Concepts like the Ford Probe actually dropped handles and all other protruding surfaces in favor of things like electrical touch panels. Seriously, go look at the photos. Even the pillars are flush.
The production vehicles designed after these concepts often used flush pull-up handles for aerodynamics. Those handles later disappeared in favor of the more reliable pull-bar handles we're familiar with because improved CFD made it clear how minimal their benefit actually was for the tradeoffs.
Of course, even if we accept that all the mechanical complexity of flush handles is necessary for aerodynamic reasons, it's not the only alternative to pull-bars. Look at the Volvo EX60 for an example. Designing a flush handle is hard. Tesla spent years working on it. It's not something undertaken for negligible aerodynamic benefits.
What tradeoff is there between pull-up and pull-out handles?
They can't take as much force and they're less reliable. Sometime in the 90s-ish a new test came into force that greatly increased the impact they had to take without unlatching and continue working. The pull bars made it easier to meet because they're secured on both sides.
The pull-up latches also caused issues for people with long nails. In some places spiders liked to nest inside them. Places with snow had issues with a sheet of ice forming over the entire panel, an issue that also occurs with modern flush latches.
People who race stock cars will even dip body panels into acid to make the panels thinner. Anything to reduce weight!
Those that care about fingerprints on their car seem like they're different people from those that drive for Uber.
Kids today miss the chagrin of damaging a protruding door handle, and the entertainment of one of their elders entirely removing one against some obstacle.
Nice, but it would have been better with more pictures to match the description IMO
Website crashes mobile safari?
Edit: correction it seems to be crashing on my adblock.
When I was about 20, I had a well used AMC Spirit.
Stylish, good gas mileage, decent performance, it was a great car. It had one fatal flaw, a weak linkage in the drivers door handle.
The linkage included a small plastic clip that didn’t quite align properly. It would pop out of place periodically, making the door impossible to open. I became adept at taking apart the door from the inside and popping the pieces back into place.
I once returned to my college dorm after a snowstorm, the car got stuck in the snow. I had another trick for this situation, I’d ease the clutch out ( leaving the back tires spinning slowly ) and would exit the car, pushing it by hand. When the wheels caught and the car started creeping forward I’d jump back in and drive off. ( Foolish, I know. I was 20. )
Well, once I had both mishaps at once. The car got stuck, so I got out to push. The door handle broke, locking me out of my car with the engine running and the wheels slowly turning!
Praying fervently, I ran to my dorm room, got my spare key and went in through the passenger door to stop the engine.
It was a memorable day.
See also: China bans hidden car door handles over safety concerns
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp37g5nxe3lo
> It comes as EVs are facing scrutiny from safety watchdogs around the world after a number of deadly incidents, including two fatal crashes in China involving Xiaomi EVs in which power failures were suspected to have prevented doors from being opened.
You had one job, door handles... but being made sleek and sexy and unlike normal door handles also made you a fucking liability.
People wonder "Why is there a law for this stupid thing, it's a regulatory hassle", and yet time and time again it comes around there was at least some partially legitimate reason said rule exists.
Simply put vehicles are at the point where we need a rule that says "The doors can be unlocked and open if the battery is dead" Full stop, no ifs, ands, or buts.
One of my unfavorite random car regulations is that as of some time in this millennium, cars sold in the USA may not have required lighting on movable bodywork.
This bans new cars from having clamshell bodywork like that found on classics like the Jaguar E-type and Ford GT40. I suspect it also results in many cars having narrower truck/hatch openings than they would have if they could put mandated lights on the trunk lid or rear hatch.
It's not hard to imagine the partially legitimate reason that on occasion, someone will drive with the trunk open, but do we really need a law about it?
> It's not hard to imagine the partially legitimate reason that on occasion, someone will drive with the trunk open
No, it's a much more serious and likely reason -- people stopping on a highway at night, getting out, and opening their trunk for some reason (like a spare tire, fluids, etc)?-- then their lights (and the reflectors in the lamp housings) are pointed at the sky.
Or, movable bodywork is more prone to be misaligned during normal operation.
Headlights get out of alignment sometimes. I posit that likelihood goes up if the lights are themselves mounted on a hood/door/whatever that can also go out of alignment.
Yeah that is important for headlamps -- but for signal and marker lamps, the point is visibility.
My dad, in the 1960s, put reflective tape on the rear bumpers.
Some automakers have chosen to meet the standard while keeping their lights on movable panels by placing additional lights/reflectors in the bumper to meet requirements.
Your post reminded me of a video on the an imported TVR Tuscan, filmed by Doug DeMuro where he covers this too. The TVR Tuscan is one of those cars where if the rear trunk is open, you can’t see the turn signal lights. In the video it is claimed that because of that, by laws in the UK, the trunk must have a triangular exclamation point sign as a safety precaution to let other drivers know when the vehicle is immobile.
That is around the seven minute mark of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32u6KPTALxg
Every safety regulation is written in blood.
That particular blood was probably people stopped at night with the trunk open to access a spare tire or tools. And then there was more blood because sometimes those people forget to leave their lights on, or their lights don't function because the battery has died, so we got more regulation requiring ugly reflectors.
And so on.
It is not the government's job to enumerate every specific brand of stupid design that may be harmful multiplied by every class of product nor should it be.
If you want to do that stuff, do it with a performance test or criteria, not with stupid whack-a-mole rules. And don't think that weasel wording the test to the same effect is any better. If you want to do this the not stupid way you need to actually do the hard work and figure out what the over-arching general case performance characteristics need to be.
With better styling cues and design that make it obvious how to use the Tesla handles (and all the degrees of copycats) it wouldn't be an issue. But that isn't the kind of sleek sext angular bullshit modern car designers like so it never got made and here we are.
Game it out - if you issue guidelines, people abuse them, then government agencies get in trouble (isn't it your job to stop this kind of thing?), so government agencies issue strict rules.
Bureaucracies have many fathers, the society we have is the result of conflict and incentives.
>Game it out - if you issue guidelines, people abuse them,
You wind up with smaller gaps with the qualitative and rules based approach than you do with the whack-a-mole list.
>then government agencies get in trouble (isn't it your job to stop this kind of thing?), so government agencies issue strict rules.
Government agencies tend to grow in scope and resources when they screw up. Even when punished, it's not like they go bankrupt and everyone is out of a job.
>Bureaucracies have many fathers, the society we have is the result of conflict and incentives.
And ideology. You can incentivize the Taliban all you want they won't send their girls to school. I postulate that the failure of american regulatory to systems to regulate without sucking is driven in large part by what goes on in the heads of the subset of people who spec out, create and operate said systems.
>enumerate every specific brand of stupid design that may be harmful
As commonly said by the libertarian at heart, right up until the point their loved one gets injured or killed, then they are at the forefront of regulation.
> But that isn't the kind of sleek sext angular bullshit modern car designers like
Who likes safety and security? These features commonly make every day use more difficult. Who needs unblocked fire exits, that takes up too much room in the building. Who needs a common interface for a safety critical device, that removes the 'cool' factor.
I don't like electric windows, either. They like to fail in the rain, and are expensive to repair.
Manual windows roll up and down for decade after decade...
Electric door locks are bad, too. After a while, they won't lock or unlock.
I've owned dozens of vehicles and I've only had locks or windows fail on one of them -- and both failed on this vehicle: It was a Ford with manual locks and windows. Turns out if you design something poorly enough even mechanical parts can fail. Point being: quality of construction matters more to reliability than anything else.
I tend to keep cars for decades. My Ford for 35 years. The manual windows and doors never failed. My dodge is 50 years old. Doors and windows still work.
I've had three cars where the electric windows failed and two where the electric door locks failed.