So at this very moment our own David Tracy is, for complex and probably unknowable reasons, driving around a Lexus dealer loaner car, an NX. He just called me up to ask me a very valid and perceptive question: does anyone like power interior door handles? I’m glad to hear this question because it’s one I’ve asked myself before, even, it seems, in the same car, a Lexus NX 350, which had some of the most needlessly confusing interior door handles that I’ve ever seen. And now here’s David, confronted with the same madness, and like anyone, he has to wonder: who wants this shit?
I know Lexus says their maddening interior door handles are to keep people from smacking cyclists with doors. They even made a video to explain it:
Okay, that’s nice, but it still doesn’t change that these door handles are confusing as hell, and I know there’s other ways to solve this. I made a video at the time about using these handles, so you can get an idea of what I’m going on about:
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I asked David if those were the same door handles he was dealing with, and here’s our exchange:
My apologies for my trousers-mouth there.
Lexus, of course, isn’t the only company to make electric-assisted interior door handles; Tesla has them and some Lincolns and I feel like a surprising number of the premium-level cars I’ve been in recently have something similar. And I can’t figure out who is clamoring for this. Is there some weirdo who shows up at every focus group and complains about having to physically pull a little handle to get out of the car? Do they complain about the exertion and not having to wait an annoying moment for the electronic lock to unlatch? Do they crave the feeling that when that electric door handle breaks, it’ll be way more complicated to deal with than a physical latch, which, for emergency reasons, has to be there as well? Do they just, somehow, suck, profoundly and deeply?
Whose car experience is improved by these things? Whose life is better because they push a little button to open a car door instead of pulling a lever?
If there’s some defense of these things, now’s the time to tell us. Because I cannot think of what it could be. They’re overcomplicated and and unintuitive and useless. Someone please explain power interior door handles to me, please. Or, barring that, let’s just talk shit about them! That’ll be fun, too!
For those of us who have literally worn our hands to the bone on regular door handles this is a godsend.
Ok, when you pull on a door handle, it puts you elbow in a natural position to push the door outwards. So why do this? What problem (Toyota’s claim aside) does this actually solve?
KISS, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it would seem to apply here. WE SHOULD NOT HAVE TO RELEARN HOW TO OPEN A CAR DOOR!
Do you want to protect cyclists? Just put the latch towards the back of the door rather than the front, so the user has to open it with the opposite hand, thus turning around and at least getting a glance of what is behind. A forced Dutch reach. There, send me my check.
https://mtc.ca.gov/news/use-dutch-reach-when-opening-car-doors
Tier 1-3 servo manufacturers are all on actuators
Lincoln Continental. Lovely car in many respects, but the electric door latches are unencumbered by the thought process.
Guess what freezes in the winter on the outside?
And this is a twofer here: You ever have the seatbelt get caught in on the door latch? In the good old days, you’d lift the door handle, and pull/push on the door, and eventually you could free the door.
But, on the Lincoln, when you press the button, the mechanism will click open, but the mechanism doesn’t stay “open”, as if you were pulling a manual door latch. Even if you hold the button down.
And there’s a neat feature that makes this even better; there’s a feature that is tied in with the electric latch, where if you don’t close the door all the way, it will automatically cinch the door to the latch to fully close it.
So when the seatbelt is caught in the door latch, and the door doesn’t close all the way, the power assembly cranks the sh-t out of the door, and really gets that seatbelt stuck in the assembly.
And the kicker? You want to drive it to the dealership to see if they can fix it? The door’s not closed all the way, so the vehicle won’t go more than 5 MPH….
Wow – that is right up there with the cars that get bricked when the battery dies, even if you’re still in it.
Do you like the Continental otherwise? I’ve always found it a handsome, distinctive design that Ford really nailed, just in time to kill it off.
I’ll answer the question with a “Sometimes”
My inititial reaction is that this is the dumbest thing ever, but our Pacifica and Caravan both have electric handles for the back sliding doors, and I like them! The difference is all in the execution: In the vans, you have a vertical handle. Tug back on it, door slides back, bump it forward, door powers forward. It’s simple and it works, and it takes a 4 year old all of one try to understand it.
That’s a design that definitely makes sense for a sliding door. It’s actually funny how many different ways you can open a Pacifica sliding door, there’s a button right in front of that handle as well, a button by the front seat dome lights, and the buttons on the key fob. 4 ways to open one door!
Those aren’t electric handles. Just electric doors.
Having confusing and non-intuitive
electrically powered controls for something as essential as opening the door to get out of the car is something only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would think is a good idea
Open the pod bay door, Hal.
I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.
We complain but if this style door handle (a push plate rather than a pull latch) had been used for decades and someone made a pull latch everyone would complain about how stupid it was. All I see is something different that maybe works less well because of a feature (electronic latch) rather than the design (push plate).
The gain is in having fewer mechanical assemblies to manufacture. The exterior door handle is now just fixed as opposed to actuating; even if the actuation just triggered the electronic opener, that’s still mechanical assembly to produce and they’re expensive.
They actually, weirdly, have MORE mechanical assemblies to manufacture because emergency mechanical parts are legally necessary.
That’s still less complicated than an actuating door handle from an assembly perspective.
This doesn’t mean I like it, it’s just the reality of modern manufacturing. The fewer mechanical moving parts the better. That means the door handle is a button with a simpler mechanical backup for the interior. They’ve been doing it on trunks for decades.
Electronic release of trunks is largely because it’s a feature – you can open them remotely. On trunks it actuates from a distance, on hatchbacks it’s coupled with an auto-opening tailgate and you really only want one part whether it’s auto opening or not. I don’t think you even need the escape pull in a hatch as well, so you have further redundancy removed.
With doors it isn’t as simple because you have to include more redundant systems in order to make it function.
Right. They realized the cost save there first because the feature existed first and could be implemented with. The cost save probably didn’t come until years after the first remote release trunk. They still implemented this years ago and now it’s on doors. I don’t really have a problem with it. It is most certainly cheaper to manufacture only a mechanical release for emergency use than to make both mechanical.
The lexus one has a seperate mini handle underneath on the outside, and the inside the handle has a mechanism to pull twice to unlatch. It’s definitely more complex.
I disagree. Just because it has a manual back up may not mean it’s more complex than if the whole handle actuated the latch. My point doesn’t rely on a backup not being present. My point relies on the idea that the handle used to open the door is not a mechanical assembly actuated by a human to open a latch. Those are much more expensive than making a back up.
Uhh, yes the button to normally open the door is less complex. But the backup is a handle (just a smaller one). It has all the same components of a normal door, plus the buttons and solenoid for electronic release.
It has the same number of moving parts as a normal door, it literally can’t be less complex.
That’s what you’re not getting though. It doesn’t have the same components as a normal door. The backup is just that, a back up. It’s not designed for day to day usage. Just like a space saver spare is not designed for day to day usage.
Ah, so you are using the wrong word. Yes it doesn’t need to be engineered with the same longevity as a normal handle. I wouldn’t call that “less complex” though. You still have to test the electric solenoid to make sure it will last, which is definitely not as easy as a door handle that has hardly changed in 100 years
That’s one of the outcomes, yes. It’s also less complex to do this. The whole area where the door door and handle meet is going to be quite different. They very well could use a different latch. Toyota being Toyota, I doubt these moves are done without significant financial gain.
Don’t bother with this guy
Aw sowwy buddy. Am I too rough to join your circle jerk?
I have to open my door with a coat hanger and I still prefer that over electric handles.
Was it your door before you opened it with a coat hanger? Or after?
Ha! Mine, the coat hanger is a jury rig for a broken latch.
Lol. My kids don’t even know what a metal coat hanger is. The concept of stealing a car with one, or fixing a car with one would warp their minds
Times change. I drove a tow truck for several years while in school and learned the “art” of slipping car locks with just about anything slim and slightly flexible. Once, while working for a newspaper, I watched out the window while a cop stood out in the rain and tried to open a car door for woman who’d locked her doors with the key in the ignition and the engine running. The cop was using a police-issue slim jim and having no luck at all. After nearly 20 minutes, I took pity on him and grabbed a pica pole (metal ruler with a small half circle head on one end used to layout pages during paper paste-up in precomputer days) and walked out offering to help. He was not particularly receptive, but I slipped the pica pole in the passenger door and popped the lock in two seconds. He got all belligerent, threatening to run me in for having burglary tools. I think he was embarrassed. I told him that Toyotas could be tricky (they weren’t), showed him the pica pole, and demonstrated the best place to catch the lock. I explained how I used to unlock cars on tow callouts. That mollified him. He still complained that I could’ve come out sooner because he was soaked through. It was a rocky start, but we became friends and it got me special access to the police when working on articles.
I think you could pretty much just copy/paste all the comments regarding the article a couple days ago about the Cadillac CTS power cupholder cover and they would apply here as well.
Those look like UX nightmare, but the switches for the power doors on the family van are simple and well designed. A 5 year old can even use them!
No the Lexus UX still has normal handles, oh wait…
My wife absolutely loves the new TX, and while I have to admit that I had few complaints about the TX we looked at a few weeks ago, those stupid interior doorhandles was certainly one of them. I found the exterior handle goofy, but that interior button setup is just dumb. The car we were looking at was in the middle of the show room, and as I climbed out I very loudly said (my wife was on the other side of the car) how annoying and unnecessary the interior door handle is. I then realized that I was surrounded by all the sales people’s desks and all were looking at me with a “Yes, yes, we know, we know” expression on their faces. The sales person helping us, who was very nice, simply responded “You get used to it, but it does make you miss normal door handles until you do”.
This poor old jeep owner had to read the headline several times because electric interior door handles are way out of my experience. I would say that if you need explanation stickers for something inside a car that is a fail.
Utterly stupid. Only negatives without benefit. If they feel they need to design the door handle to make it less likely to hit cyclists, they could locate it in the shoulder area. This would be too awkward or impossible to open with the left hand, necessitating the driver to turn their body to use their right hand to operate the handle and, by extension, placing their head in a better position to be able to see a potential cyclist (or inattentive Tesla driver). Basically, it forces a Dutch reach.
If I have to be a member of Cirque du Soleil to open my car door, I am going to buy a different car.
Move while you can—it seems they’ll soon have us wheeled around like in Wall-E in the name of safety and convenience (two things I’m getting increasingly annoyed by to the point where I’m seriously considering a kit car as a daily in my late 40s even more than when I was a teenager).
I have an Austin Healey kit/replica (I don’t daily it, but it’s more than just a weekend car) and I have to say the utter simplicity is so great. The only electronics are in the radio and distributor.
It’s dumb, but I watched a video the other day of someone starting an old Imperial and I had forgotten how refreshingly simple it was to just get into a car and turn a key (after pumping the throttle if carbed, which was an automatic motion). Nothing had to boot up, there was no dumb shit disclaimer to accept on a glued-on iPad, no warning stickers all over, no “safety” alarms, no computer questioning your inputs no matter how simple and obvious, and no nannies to shut off (YMMV there). All this obnoxious wuss stuff has done is flipped me from appreciating safety to being ready to ditch altogether just to stop being annoyed and get some sense of connection with the machine back. I’ve always worn a seatbelt, but with the way the stupid things grab today like an aggressively horny octopus any time I try to lean forward at a stop to see down the road (thanks partly to poor visibility in the name of safety) makes me want to ditch that even. Life isn’t worth living if it means being in a constant state of annoyance, particularly when it’s happened to one of the things I (used to) enjoy most. Or to paraphrase Ivan Drago: If I die, I die. (Sorry, Carl Weathers! RIP)
I just picked up a Chevy Malibu rental. The car isn’t bad, but it would occasionally make noises on the dive to alert me to something, but I have no idea what.
I’m a mechanical engineer – not a Luddite – but I like simple things that just WORK, first time, every time. KISS – keep it simple, stupid. I constantly rail against needlessly complicated solutions to simple problems. My go to quote is “Don’t give me a Rolls Royce solution to a Chevrolet problem.” This is sort of thing is absolutely absurd and ridiculous.
My Camaro’s BMW style double pull door handles are already enough to confuse the fuck out of most people, so no, do not want electric handles.
This reminds me of my first ride on a Tesla. I couldn’t figure out how to open the door and a friend pointed to the button. The damn button doesn’t have any label. I bet a lot of Uber passengers were on the same situation as me. Give me a damn handle.
The kind of people that like them, are the same people who argue in comments section threads for thirty replies about why Apple Vision Pro is going to dominate the world. Stay away from these people.
the technology to avoid hitting bikers with your door is called “using your eyes” and it’s been around forever.
If only there were a device one could attach to a car door that would allow one to see behind the car prior to opening said door. It could offer a mere glimpse of the rear view, or it could allow one to scan the entire area. They could call it a “mere-or.”
The technology exists, but I have the scars to prove it has not been widely adopted.
unpopular take, but I feel the same way about power tailgates on suv’s or power sliding doors on minivans. They just take sooo long to operate and usually I just want to throw my stuff in the back, slam it shut, and move on.
OMG yes.
I love power tailgates and sliding doors. You dont have to get your hands dirty while closing the hatch and sliding doors make things easier for kids going in and out of the car. I don’t get concerned of someone slamming the door.
I’m with you. My father’s Jeep GC has that, and I hate how it even tries to in effect discourage you from closing it yourself, just by how it feels when you try…like you’re breaking it.
And I’m sure that feeling will always be there, even after the power mechanism breaks.
I hear you. I’m so impatient I constantly have the seat belt lock up on me from pulling on it too quickly. Fortunately don’t have power anything in the fleet of junk I’m driving
The power lift strut went out on my car’s liftgate, so I unplugged it and disconnected it. Every once in a while I think about fixing it, but it’s just so much more convenient (and faster) just to walk up and lift the thing myself that I lose any interest in spending the cash to get a new part.
My brother yells at me when I manually close the power sliding door on his Sienna. I can appreciate the feature, but as long as I’m not doing any damage drive mechanism, let me slam that big sheet of steel and glass shut, with a satisfying ‘clunk’.
I agree on the power liftgate but I’ve found the power doors incredibly handy so the kids get in and out on their own.
When I ordered my CX-30 I specifically got the Base Turbo trim WITHOUT the power tailgate (and a few other little things) because I loathe them so very much, so why would I spend several thousand more dollars for equipment I would actively hate using?
I’m going to disagree on this. Being able to open all of those doors on my van right from the driver’s seat has already been a benefit to me a number of times. I have the sliding doors open with a touch of a button before I’m even out of the car. Very handy with kids. Even better, my daughter is able to close the door with a push of a button after she’s climbed inside. Non power sliding doors are tough for a young kid to operate, and can be a little bit dangerous.
I can understand that the liftgate can be pretty slow, but again, normally I hit the button from the key fob (if I’m outside the van) or from the front seat so that the liftgate is already open before I can even get to the back of the van. I hit the button to close it and it does so as I walk away.
It takes a while to get into those habits but you get used to them over time.
I’m not nearly bougie enough to have ever even ridden in a car with electric door handles, much less driven one. It’s probably best that I avoid stuff like this, I deal with technology breaking down all day long at work so when I get home all I want is for things to work. Something like this glitching when I’m trying to open my car door would send me over the edge.
> I deal with technology breaking down all day long at work so when I get home all I want is for things to work.
This. I have written enough software and built enough systems to know that more of it is a liability. So my home network is simple, I don’t even run a pihole and use third party DNS, no smart home, no automation apps on my phone, no IFTTT. Older cars where you can reason about what broke. Sometimes the roku misbehaves or the home audio receiver has accidentally been changed to the wrong input so there’s no sound, and more often than not I just give up on watching whatever I was going to watch and read instead.
Complexity is the enemy. That’s a principle I try to etch into my teams.
Same. When I come home after herding bits all day and the wireless keyboard won’t connect to the HTPC preventing me from watching my Star Trek I lose my shit. I just have no patience for misbehaving technology in my personal life so I keep things as simple as possible.
So it’s not just me! 😀
As much as I like new technology, I just don’t understand the real “need” to replace simple cable operated door handles. Cable operated ones can break too, but it just feels like a safer option in a crash (especially if there is a fire potential) to have a simple mechanical design to get out… and not have to know where there is emergency release if the electro-mechanical system fails.
But then—in the less likely event it goes bad—a normal person could fix it themselves or barring that, any run-of-the-mill mechanic instead of having to go to the dealer so they can spend hours diagnosing the exact fault, replacing the part (that they won’t have in stock), and reprogramming the ECU to recognize it.
Haha good point(s)
The Lexus salescritter I talked to wasn’t even excited about them, and he was super excited about the exterior door handles on the RX I test drove (they look like regular door handles, but actually have buttons that send the signal to the actuator–if they look normal, why can’t I just pull them and open the door!?). In fact, he was super jazzed about every dumb electronic feature, but even he couldn’t present those as a positive. He presented them as weird, but “super easy once you’re used to them,” which was probably the most fair assessment he gave of any feature he showed me.
So I think that means absolutely no one is or has ever been excited to drive a car with those.
Wait, I take it back. I forgot that he did pitch it as connected to the safety feature of keeping you from opening your door into traffic. Which has never been a problem for me, since most vehicles I have driven have been equipped with both windows and mirrors. He still admitted it wasn’t the most intuitive system.
I know this is discussed here from time to time, but stuff like this always makes me ponder anew what the used vehicle market will be like in say 5-10 years.
All this tech is probably fine for the original owner – it’ll either work right or be fixed when it breaks, but what will it be like for the 2nd or 3rd owner who’ll be using it at a later point in its lifecycle, and may not be as contentious or pecunious (?) as that original owner?
Can manufacturers hate even the idea of second-hand owners. So this all makes a lot of sense.
Yep. I have had a window crank seize up. It was an easy enough fix. An electric lock actuator? Not too bad, especially since it was a Ford Explorer, but a bit more expensive. Something like this, which they may well decide to move away from after one generation? Finding the part will be hard enough, then making sure it talks to the sensor, only to realize it’s the sensor constantly reading false activity…replace the sensor and hope it wasn’t something corrupted in the hardware…etc.
That’s a good point – the affordability/accessibility angle seems like it’s going to become bigger and bigger as time goes on.
In the not-too-recent past, buying a used car could mean you got something at maybe an 80% functionality level and it wasn’t too hard to bring it up to 90-95%. But does the future entail used cars at like a 50% level after a couple of owners, with a pricey bar to overcome to get it past that?
And like you point out, what happens when the ever-increasingly amount sensors, esp. safety ones, go bad? I’m thinking of things like the very high hooded pickups we see now that rely on sensors to detect pedestrians in front of them b/c its nearly impossible for a driver to actually see for themselves.
That’s not a new thing, though. BMW 7 series, Audis, MB S class, all those have long been playgrounds for the hot new stuff, and they get murdered on resale because that stuff always breaks and can’t be fixed, or costs $2k in shop time just to diagnose, etc.
Can you imagine dealing with the headache of explaining how they work anytime someone takes a ride in your car.
Yeah, that was the first issue that crossed my mind. You leave the instruction stickers and still have to point people to them or you remove them and explain to each new rider. No thank you.
Easy, just be alone all the time.