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!
Speaking for myself here, but I get a little thrill when a car has manual windows. I would hate this so hard.
And manual seat adjustment. I think things really started to go down hill with dual zone climate control. After all, how many cubic feet of air does a car have? It’s the same damn climate! Sheesh.
This is so true,dual zone climate in a bus,yes,not in a fucking 3 door..
Hate the idea, what the hell is wrong with how doors have worked for hundreds of years. I think it’s change for the sake of change, Hell, Tesla reinvented the wheel, making it much worse, of course. My wife’s Audi lacks the sill mounted door locks that you can pull up on, that freaks me out enough about being locked in the car. I guess we’re that stupid now, we’re too lazy to glance into the gigantic mirror attached to the door to check for cyclists before flinging it into traffic. so fucking sad…
I got doored when riding my bike last year. Hurt like hell, ended up in the ER, driver was driving with expired insurance so I had to pay to fix my bike that I use for commuting 50% of the time and the ER bill. If this means that I won’t get doored by a Lexus I’m all for it. For other people, I mean, no way would I want to drive a car with power interior door handles.
I feel for you, but I would add, fuck uninsured drivers. Also oddly, drivers are not as big a part of the problem. A heck of a lot of dooring I’ve witnessed and even experienced a couple times were passengers. Usually exiting cabs. Their brain isn’t even wired for considering others on the road and that’s actually understandable. They aren’t in command of the vehicle. Given how many ride hails are Lexus vehicles, maybe this is not such a bad idea. At least for the rear doors.
I could just see some clever drivers saying “if you had just paid for the premium subscription, you wouldn’t be stuck back their now”.
Rear seat passenger also doesn’t have a mirror. Turn head for a view of the monstrously wide c pillar. Is frequently a child. All reasons I told the kid who doored me who said he was sorry while his mom yelled about the black tire smudge on her door card “It wasn’t your fault. Your mom is supposed to check if it’s safe to open your door.”
Throw it up the flagpole and see who salutes.
I can only assume someone in marketing is reading this and writing it down in their notebook for the next TIR meeting.
VW’s CEO took the feedback about their cars’ stupid interior UI and rolled back buttonlessness a bit in the next gen. Maybe Lexus will do the same.
Does Anyone Actually Like Power Interior Door Handles?Does Anyone Actually Like Any modern vehicle (software defined)? So now It’s deemed beyond our ability to look in the side mirror before opening the door. Is the goal to turn the populace into totally dependent gelatinous blobs that somehow retain a credit card so they can make monthly payments to warm their gelatinous butts ?
If they can no longer pull a key out of their pocket, insert it in the ignition and twist, then, well, here we are.
The worst thing about push button ignition is where the f do I keep my keys? With keyed ignition, they’re… In the steering column. Unless you’re a scandophilic psychopath. But the point is they don’t rattle around, and they don’t end up in 30 different spots in the front of the car because there isn’t a natural, obvious place to store that fob while you’re driving.
I like proximity door unlock, but keyless ignition isn’t a marked improvement to me.
Well the obvious place is to leave the key in your pocket or wherever you carry your key when you aren’t driving.
The problem is the size of the fobs. My car used to have a single key on an old hood pin that I rarely even felt. Now, I also have a phone (smallest available and still too big) on top of the bulky key fob taking up pocket space, especially annoying when sitting down. Fine in winter wearing a coat with pockets, but not in nice weather.
That’s the thing: sometimes they’re in my pocket, sometimes in my bag. The key (heh) is there isn’t one permanent, objectively dedicated and inevitable place to put them. So they end up everywhere.
If I have to put the fob somewhere I stick it in the alleged “cup holder” that I keep change in closest to the thing it looks like a gearshift that you press forward to go backwards and backwards to go forward (why? who came up with that? Is there some law?), but I tend to leave the key in the car if I do that.
They’ve never made sense nor made the experience better and what’s worse is they have a mechanical backup! Ridiculous. (err well they’re supposed to have a mechanical backup, looking at you tesla)
There are 74 comments posted as I write this, and none of them have addressed the key issue here, although Torch misdirected his readers away from the lede rather than burying it.
We know that David is doing the Santa Monica one-car challenge with his girlfriend, whom he took out for a very nice dinner somewhere entirely unassociated with a plumbing fixture, and they’re using her Lexus RX350 for reasons to which all parties will stipulate. However, there is now a dealer loaner in play.
Not gonna speculate publicly, but I’m certainly going to stay tuned. And if the official explanation is too prosaic, we all can make up our own. Repeated often enough, it becomes the truth.
Her Lexus is currently in having the door handles serviced.
Dammit Lexus and Lincoln, if I want to Reggie Hammond someone, I’m gonna Reggie Hammond them!
I did a lot of riding around in the TX at the GX event and I agree, I hate them. Thing is, my mom bought an NX with the same handles so I knew already how they worked and they still got me EVERY SINGLE TIME. I see what they were going for, but let me just say that I am so happy the GX550 has real door handles inside and out.
I could just imagine the questions people will have for me when I roll the window down to open the door. No, it’s not broke, I’m to dumb to operate the fancy electric gizmo.
I am rather keen on power door handles. They remind of my natural superiority over the plebes who must be prepared to leap out of their vehicles at a moments notice to scrabble in the street for twigs, candle wax, and whatever other detritus they might find useful for assembling the requisites of daily living. Power door handles also allow me to exit my vehicle whilst holding at least one pinky finger perfectly erect.
Creating something new for sake of creating.
Because product management said you could, does not mean you should.
This is one of the easiest cases of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines I’ve ever seen.
I’m (actually, not sarcastically) pleased Autopian is on the case. I really loathe this trend of “things that have worked for the span of human existence [e.g., handles and pulling on handle shaped things] could really use a freshening up that abstracts away the functionality with needless complexity, while adding a diagram and a lot of words and labels to inform everyone just how clever we are.”
Amen! And while we are at it, bring back the PRNDL shifter for automatics! I get into an unfamiliar car, and it takes me minutes to figure out how to shift into Drive.
Just put it in H. It’s easy.
Hrive.
just something else to fail expensively
“Who wants a $350 interior door handle when a $25 interior door handle will do?”
Toyota’s Division of Electronic Redundancy Department clearly had a hand in this.
“to keep people from smacking cyclists with doors”
A. for the two times a year that I park on a street
B. I got eyes, don’t I?
FIFY
Power door handles are a ‘no’ for me, dawg.
If they in any way help cyclists from getting blasted by idiots who can’t check before opening their door, it’s worth it. I have no idea if that’s the case though?
So does this work different than the Kia one that won’t let you open a door when a car is oncoming? Those looked like actual door handles so think it was more a lock actuated thing.
Also preventing you from opening your door when a car is flying at you is a better example than preventing the cyclist going 10mph from hitting your stationary door. If their reasoning is to prevent from hitting a cyclist who’s flying past cars that people are trying to get into/out of, “I say let em crash.”
Also also, yeah the ergonomics suck, they can make it work like a regular handle and just have it wire actuated, it doesn’t have to be new and special and hard to figure out.
It seems as time goes on and technology trickles down this sort of thing will be more prevalent. When a base model car now has features that were once ‘luxury’ options you have to justify that higher cost somehow.
I just wish it was more an approach of higher quality, as opposed to making things more complicated, convoluted or ‘advanced’. How about instead of a needlessly complex automatic door opener you just make the regular handle out of a nicer material or hand-finish it, something other than just adding more damn gadgets and wiring..
Ok, rant over..
Wholly new features or qualities that can be defined by numbers are easy marketing short hand. The whole idea is to sell them on the car before they even get to the dealer to do a comparison. Car A and Car B have the same kind (a normal functioning) door handle. Car B cost twice as much because the handle is machined aluminum with a perfectly weighted and smooth pull while Car A has cheap plastic that pops and creaks like a lineman’s knees. Now imagine if Car B could say “MOTORIZED CONVENIENT NIFTY DOOR HANDLES”. It’s an easier sell to someone who hasn’t seen either car yet.
Car B until they say they’re motorized. Also, IME, the cheap stuff isn’t that cheap feeling anymore (and my last two cars were Focuses and the current a GR86, all of which are criticized for their interior quality) and the motorized stuff isn’t of better quality even when it’s not a touch pad with no or artificial feedback.
We now have cars that can last for 250K miles or more They do cost 2-3X what they should (e.g. the replacement for the $8K truck I bought new in 1987 is about $45K now, where inflation accounts for about half of the increase). The various accessories that make up the car, however, only last for 50K miles (and cost 10X what it would otherwise cost to fix them if they were designed the old way. Ah, progress!
That’s something I like about my 6.9. It was obscenely expensive but almost all of what went to engine and suspension engineering and bank vault build quality. The only fancy stuff is the power sunroof (in 1978!) and heated seats (front and back!) The rest of the interior is the same as the cheap W116s. They didn’t even include a power outside mirror on the passenger side, like they did in other models later (and only on the passenger side, with jist a handle on the driver side). Because the car is so huge, it takes a lot of effort to adjust the passenger side mirror and you most definitely can’t do it while driving.
The video makes it look like you just push that paddle/button and open the door. Is that all it is?
Sounds like the PKE system on my C6. Push button, open door. Works fine for me. It’s more of an annoyance when the fob or car battery dies, though.
If you absolutely must have a solenoid actuated door latch Corvettes have a pretty decent button setup. It’s a grab handle on the door with a momentary button right where your thumb would naturally fall when you grasp it.
For the love of Studebakers I don’t know what they are trying to do with this design though. Their explanation makes it sound more like a terrible design that they are trying desperately to justify.
Got it. This is the perfect solution for all those people who lost their middle 3 digits on their hand from an industrial accident. Regular door handles are just cumbersome.
A simple Shaka sign on the door at the Lexus entrance would inform all buyers of aloha and welcome.
All is forgiven now with just the touch of a button.