Comment by AlotOfReading
6 hours ago
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-...
Exactly it is not science but purely cosmetic. Which for some reason makes HN mad but guess what people choose cars based on how they look and how they are marketed! There has never been a rational man. Spock is not real.
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.
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People who race stock cars will even dip body panels into acid to make the panels thinner. Anything to reduce weight!
> 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.
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.
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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.