I read the article. It sounds like the auto makers concern is that they don’t think they have been given enough time to solve the problem (the problem being one which may kill people while we wait for a solution).
I think we should give them all the time they want, as long as they stop selling cars without safe door handles RIGHT NOW.
“We meed more time even though door handles are a solved problem.”
Your comment is giga based because it doesn’t let the overton window get shifted by being too suggestible.
Your brain still went where logic goes, not where was suggested. So important at times like this.
All in all, quality
I’m calling corpo lobbied bullshit. 2 years is enough time to put a normal door handle on your car.
they got lazy, they fully adopted the electronic one, and dint want to “waste money” bringing back the old one, in thier recent and future models.
Cars are designed up to 5 years in advance. Usually the last 2 years before production is dedicated to endurance testing.
They’re not being expected to design a whole new car from scratch though, are they.
Tesla doesn’t do any of that, nor crash testing
A quick search says they do crash testing, is this bullshit?
Of course they do crash testing, you can go watch videos of it if you want. That’s just a bot, or someone who knows fuck all. Their cars are always top ranked in crash saftey.
You mean like that cybertruck shit made of rusting “stainless” steel, with no crumple zone and a body that reflects the sun in other drivers eyes?
Yeah, doubt it. They aren’t even legal in Europe because of safety.
Who told you that? Elmo?
Top ranked for the people inside the cars. Not so safe for the people mining the material to replace cars that get totaled, etc. but most people don’t give enough of a fuck to count anyone but the occupants of the car
Won’t catch me dead driving a tesla but obviously they test safety in order to pass regulations lol
I mean… if they didn’t test their cars, they really must have the best engineers in the world, being able to go from just engineering plans to getting a 5 star saftey rating at all the agencies. Those engineers would be worth their weight in gold lol.
So how do they deal with routine and unexpected defects that every manufacturer deals with for every model?
Fix them after 5 years of course! /s
“That’s harder than it sounds.”
Is it, though? Is it really? We’ve been making manual car door latches for 100 years.
It’s only hard for Musk, and only because he just doesn’t want to do it.
Seriously. Every other car maker has figured out how to make normal door handles. You can even buy the parts directly from them if you find it too hard to design yourself.
After renting a couple cars with electronic door poppers, I find them plainly worse than mechanical door latches. They’re a solution in search of a problem, and some implementations are hazardous.
I think having an electric popper on top of an mechanical door latch (actual door handles are standard mechanic, but there’s solenoid that can actuate them independently) is okay if you can find an actual usecase.
I mean sure still stupid but at least it isn’t dangerous.
Same way electric locks have worked for the past 30 years on cars.
An old civic might be able to unlock from a key fob, but that’s only an electronically controlled solenoid controlling a lock which is mechanical in nature, and who’s main user-accessible interaction point is mechanically linked to the lock.
I think having an electric popper on top of an mechanical door latch is okay
The problem with having both is that the electronic one is always the primary one, and the one people will use daily. In particular Tesla hides the mechanical ones really well. So in an emergency situation, people panic and have no idea where it is or how to use it.
Same way electric locks have worked
Electric locks actually serve a purpose though. And they’re not a danger to passengers inside. What purpose do electric door handles serve? Other than being more prone to failure, more expensive, and dangerous?
The purpose of the electric latch is to save the frameless window panes. It can lower the window slightly in the instant before it opens, to break the seal and avoid torsion on the glass.
Now, frameless windows are stupid and not necessary, so theres that. One dumb idea propagates another.
This doesn’t pass a sanity check.
A mechanical handle that actuates when deflected 30 degrees can trip a microswitch at 10 degrees to slightly open the window.
You don’t need an electric latch to have frameless windows. Pretty much every car before with frameless windows did not have them.
They were hazardous when they were on Corvettes too. They should have banned them back then.
The rental cars in question were, in fact Corvettes. Corvettes are still using them.
im occasional ride in my parents leased ioniq5 and the door handles are lik teslas, very flimsy to the feel.
I hear they are a solution to the problem of increasing mileage/efficiency. I am no fan of Tesla, but we have to admit, there is some merit to that argument, however debatable the efficiency benefits are.
That’s not to say safety isn’t a serious issue. The biggest problem is the reliance on electronics. Now if someone can reinvent the design with a highly reliable mechanical system, with multiple redundancy.
I’ve seen three designs for purely mechanical flush door handles in production use:
- A handle with a central hinge where one side is pushed inward to make the other side stick out to be pulled. This design has been used on aircraft for many decades, and has also made its way to a few cars.
- A pull-up door handle with an additional flap in front of the access area. This was used on the Subaru XT/Alcyone/Vortex.
- A handle that pushes in to open, usually found on a portion of the door that’s more horizontal to the ground. Used on the C3 Corvette, among others.
The push-then-pull central hinge is probably not a great choice for the application because its operation will be less obvious to a rescuer trying to get the door open quickly. It’s still better than something that requires electronics.
The Model 3 / Model Y are push to pull, it’s just not a centred hinge, it’s more to the left side, within the 1st 1/4 or so.
There’s no reason they couldn’t have done that but also make it mechanical if they’d wanted to.
Tesla disregarded all knowledge about automotive door safety to make a more expensive and much more dangerous door handle.
This is what libertarians do for literally everything.
Libertarians are just people too dumb to understand code requirements in every industry and profession.
The only thing libertarians understand is that they can make more money if they charge a full price for a half-ass job.
“too dumb to understand code requirements in every industry and profession.”
Or selfish. Unfortunately Hanlon’s razor can only cut so deep.
Hyperloop!
That one pisses me off so much. We could have had a high speed rail with actual throughput instead of claims of something better before nothing
Did you just take a complete left turn into politics land?
This article is about automotive regulations. It was never not politics.
They didn’t reply to the article, they replied to a comment about Tesla making dumb choices.
Is this because the door handle is some complicated electronic mechanism rather than a latch? Gee who could have possibly predicted that would be a problem.
My neighbour has a Tesla and last year I had great fun watching her trying to defrost her car enough to get the door handle to even come out.
I have had to put quite a bit of force into a car door to get it to open on many an occasion. (Ice is a bitch) A normal door handle just works, stop trying to fix it!
Yeah, but in those cases you actually can get a grip to pull on.
Unlike those hidden handles.
Opel Corsa 1993 presents:
Flat aerodynamic door handles.
Unless you’re planning to drive your car around at about 150 miles per hour I don’t imagine that the aerodynamicism of door handles really comes into account. Especially since you’ve still got wing mirrors, wipers, and aerials on the car.
I looked into this a long time ago, and it was likely they were getting around 2-3 miles of extra range from it.
I’d say it’s less important now than it was back then, when batteries weren’t as good and a mile or two anywhere was important.
It comes into play much sooner than that when you’re designing for maximum range on an electric vehicle.
Source on that? Hobbiest aerodynamics nerd and big into F1 (and did a lot of liquid system design engineering in a previous job). Genuinely curious!
My gut feel is that a half kilo of unsprung weight (those ridiculous wheels), tighter fenders, or a bit of tail teardropping would go so much further than anything door-handle-wise. It’s certainly helping promote flow attachment, but you’ve got poor flow rates there because of the wing mirrors anyway
I’m talking out of my ass. I’m big into (mostly sim) racing myself, but I have no formal training or experience. You probably know way more about it than me!
If you’re a racing nerd then you know how strong the suckage can be. My car uses premium fuel and I get about 7L/100km on the highway. That adds up on long trips, so I try to save fuel when I can. I’ve tried drafting behind transport trucks. Even at only 90 kmph, I was able to get that number down to 5L/100km.
Electric vehicles have a lot of design features to cut down on aerodynamic and mechanical drag. Special hub caps, no grilles, low drag tires, etc. for the purpose of helping their main problem and selling point: the vehicle’s range on a single charge. I assumed the flush door handles were just another design feature for reducing aerodynamic drag, where every little bit counts.
Again, this is all out of my ass. I am well aware that aerodynamics are far far more complex than “smooth = better”, and that most cars are probably already designed so the door handles aren’t a problem. Maybe the door handles make no difference and having them flush is just optics for Tesla.
Kudos for your humility, but you just said that you have no idea the magnitude.
I didn’t mean to discount your awareness of the margins of optimization. It’s quite a thing moving the needle in an established market (not to mention the money and years of R&D). But this ain’t it
harder than it sounds… yeah the technology isn’t there yet! we need research and scientific breakthrough to invent a door handle that you can actually handle. no one’s even thought of the concept before.
Whatever. Luxury e-cars are the new Bimmers.
Like zim zimma? That kind of bimma?
They wish. My 30 year old $2500 bmw e36 was nicer inside than the last model 3 I had the misfortune of sitting in, and was the most reliable car I’ve owned. Straight 6 And 5 speed, beaten and slid daily until I sold it with 200k miles. My biggest problem with that car was keeping back tires on it. Man some days I wish I never sold that car… Moved north and a slammed 2wd car isn’t gonna get me to work over the mountain pass in the winter. Now I drive a POS 2012 Subaru with fried oil control rings. If the bimmer had a LSD I probably would still be driving it 🤬
I hate fucking “flush handles”. Good riddance to terrible garbage.
At least they work as a quick visual cue that a car is designed with zero utilitarians in the room
I knew. A guy with a fully shaved mr2 (yes that means no door handles). Doors opened with a remote to operate the latch. He also had a cable run down under the side skirt, so if it failed you could manually pull the cable to get the door oprn. This was put together by a 24 year old in school, not some “genius”
I find them cool. But if they become unusable in freezing weather or kill people because of an overcomplex emergency release from the inside?..
They’re like an idea a twelve year old Steve Jobs / Jony Ive wannabe would come up with.
Big government is oppressing small businesses again! Thanks Obama!
Cry me a river.
The issues could cascade beyond the design. The auto manufacturing industry operates on strict production schedules. Though it builds in time to validate and test whatever new features come in each new model, the sudden intro of a design change late in the process could throw off the delicate timetable.
FFS, it’s a bloody door handle, not full self driving tech. Author is full of BS.
A lot of upvotes here, and I think they’re ignoring how much is involved in production pipelines and the overhead of sourcing suppliers. That said, Musk has a habit of throwing in last minute changes and the company manages to handle those but much like self driving they ship late
Yeah let’s see, if the handle would have to be a different shape, they may need a different cutout for the door, different handle moulds, different mechanical parts, updated electronics… does anyone have a fucking clue how difficult it is to program one of those robotic arms? How expensive new moulds are? Any other potential knock-on effects this may have on the internal design?
People with the mentality of ‘it’s just a small plug at the bottom of the pool, how bad could it possibly be if we removed it’
By the time you’re deciding to make all those potential changes, now the question is, if we already have to reprogram the robots, and get new moulds, do we want to make any other changes on this door at the same time, so that we don’t have twice the downtime to make the 2 changes?
Great. Next please: no more touch-controls. I want back haptic buttons for the most important stuff.
EDIT: Instead of silly downvotes, an opinion on why touchscreens/-buttons are superior would be preferable. I’m curious.
Touchscreens are infinitely reconfigurable. And the solution is cheaper. Some like the cleaner look when avoiding all the buttons and knobs.
Sure, for anything else than a car. But I don’t want to have to look at it while driving 250km/h, I want to feel if I have the right button and also pressed it. Pure safety.
Everywhere else I’d surely prefer a touchscreen over haptic buttons. I mean I have through this great tech-evolution, I love it. But it all has its place, and the car doesn’t seem like the right place for it. At least not for everything.
Fair. But most of these cars have voice controls that are even safer than using an array of buttons. I’ve never felt unsafe in my wife’s Tesla except when they once moved the defrost control early on. But that was when I started using the voice controls and never look back (haha - unintentional play on words there). My Kia won’t even let you use the touch screen to type in an address while it’s in drive - however it’s voice control for navigation is terrible. But it allows car play and Siri is plenty adequate for voice control with navigation.
Who cares? You only have yourself to blame for buying a Tesla.
Dude, you act like you’ve never been burned by someone in your life. Instead of shaming people for purchasing something and getting burned, we should all be getting together and shaming the companies that are enshitified.
Someone bought a Tesla.
I did, in 2020, and I liked everything except the range. Moved from that to a more invasive Chinese BYD, no regrets. My Han has electronic AND mechanical door handles.
A) Yes, at this point we can blame the idiots buying Teslas too.
B) This sounds like it would only impact new sales
C) Nothing about Teslas are “enshittificarion”. It doesn’t mean “getting shittier”, or “are shitty”.
cries in memory of his old favorite pasta sauce now having water as the primary ingredient instead of tomato paste
