alt Hacker NewsYeah, 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.
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kube-system • yesterday at 7:02 PM
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.
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.