► Why have car door handles become so complicated?
► Modern car door handles are a plague on the car world
► But that might be changing if China gets its way
Door handles. A simple tool to get you in and out of somewhere, yet a detail that car manufacturers insist on screwing up.
I’m not a luddite. I’m not against touchscreens (as long as they work). I largely like and agree with modern safety tech. But door handles? Why, oh why, do car manufacturers insist on making a core function – getting in and out of a car – harder.
I think silly door handles have a place on exotica (I’m not against the TVR Cerbera having a button hidden under the door mirrors) but on normal cars? Absolutely not.
Let me indulge you with some particularly irksome recent examples of utterly sh*t door handles. Let’s start with the new Audi A6, which, like most new Audis, now has flush door handles that don’t move. They don’t pop out (a good thing) but are operated on the exterior by pressing a button on the inside of the handle that releases the door.
Fine in principle. Except on a recent test car the latch stopped working properly, meaning the rear door of this A6 wouldn’t close. For it to go back to be fixed we had to use a ratchet strap on the inside. On a £70,000 Audi.
I’ve also recently spent six months with a Cupra Tavascan long-termer for our sister publication Parkers. It’s a car I wouldn’t recommend for a variety of reasons, but high up on the list are the door handles. They are another example of flush monstrosities but require two opening actions before the door opens (one for the keyless entry to ‘unlock’ and another for the handle to open).
Most of the time the door handle stayed flush with the car when you opened it, but occasionally the handle would open up, giving you the feeling that you’d just snapped it off. Awful.
My final example is the flush ‘pop-out’ door handles that are, for me, the plague of modern cars. I’m going to use the Renault Scenic as an example – an excellent car, yet one I couldn’t buy as the door handles annoy me so much – but this is far from an issue unique to this electric SUV.
The whole idea is they stay flush to the car for aero, but pop-out when the car is unlocked. Trouble is, if you don’t get in the car straight away they go back in, leading you to do this awkward interaction where you essentially have to prise the door handle to pop out. There’s then the issue of cold weather, too, with flush, pop-out door handles being far more prone to getting stuck with ice than conventional ones.
It’s not just exterior door handles, either, but those on the interior as well. Firms such as Fiat, Lexus, BMW and Ford all use an electronic latch (e-latch) system where there’s a press of a button on the inside to unlock the door. Yet there is still a manual release, so what’s the point of having both?
And don’t get me started on those on a Tesla which feel so flimsy that you could snap them off with even a small bit of a force. A quick read of the forums reveals I’m not the only one.
But it’s not just the annoyance of modern handles but also an issue of safety. Bloomberg published a recent story about the dangers of Teslas not having proper back-up door handle releases, meaning that – from the outside – there’s no way of getting the door open if the car has no power (for instance, following a crash that’s rendered the driver unconscious). A scary prospect, and one emergency services are aware of.
But it goes a step further as the Chinese government is reportedly considering banning the use of fully retractable hidden electric door handles, as first reported by media organisation Mingjing Pro. Discussions are rumoured to be underway, and though semi-retractable and traditional handles would be allowed, they must incorporate a mechanical back-up. Enforcement could begin as early as 2027, and the impact could be significant.
For consumers and safety as a whole, it has to be a good thing. But for car manufacturers having to re-engineer their cars it could be an enormous and expensive headache. Albeit one I think they deserve for using them in the first place.
They’re liked by car designers because of the clean lines that flush handles create, and engineers like them because it helps reduce drag and improve aerodynamics. But according to Car News China, flush door handles contribute to a 0.01Cd reduction in drag coefficient, bringing fairly minimal differences of a couple of miles max on an EV’s range. Is it worth it? For me, it’s an unambiguous no.
So maybe China’s stance could signal the end of these stupid modern door handles? I bloody hope so.