Something funny about fast cars is that you often end up paying more for less. Less weight and fewer seats than your average car, sure, but also fewer standard features, and I’m not just talking about long options lists. The McLaren MP4-12C and Dodge Viper both launched without a common feature that pretty much every car regardless of price tag has, a fascinating shared quirk.
Perhaps surprisingly, this missing feature doesn’t have to do with luxury. Even though the Dodge Viper is known to be the antonym to luxury, the McLaren MP4-12C was well equipped, with dual-zone climate control, touchscreen infotainment, bi-xenon headlights, and a proximity key. Not uncommon stuff in mainstream cars, but you certainly won’t find some of these things on new base models, let alone classic cars.
It doesn’t have to do with safety, either. Although the Viper’s safety features consisted of seat belts, and, um, tires, the McLaren MP4-12C had multi-mode stability control, anti-lock brakes, six airbags, hill hold assist, and brake assist – genuine modern car stuff with no small-batch supercar quirkiness here.
This commonality that I write of isn’t a general trait, but it is a feature, or rather the absence of one. Something that was rectified mid-way through the production run of each car — a lack of exterior door handles. You’d think these would be critical features, but both Dodge and McLaren had their own solutions for omission, each reflective of their respective company’s philosophy.
Yes, the original Viper was so pared-back, it even deemed exterior door handles to be fripperies. How did it pull this off? By also not taking windows, or indeed security, particularly seriously. Instead of panes of tempered glass like you’d expect on, you know, a car, the original Viper featured, well, tent material. Soft transparent plastic set into zippered textile stretched over a frame. No hope of rolling these down, just slide them into where a normal window would go, fit the tabs on the removable windows into their slots in the door card, and that’s as good as the windows got. Wanted to get inside? Simply unzip the plastic window and reach in for the interior door handle.
In contrast, the McLaren MP4-12C doesn’t look like it’s wearing a toupee, and the windows aren’t made of old tent materials, so how do you get in without exterior door handles? Is it like a 1990s show car with shaved door handles and remotes to pop the doors open? Not quite. See, instead of exterior door handles, the MP4-12C initially featured capacitive touch panels underneath the bodywork that you’d swipe on to pop the doors open. Just slide your hand under the character line on the door, swipe toward the rear of the car, and the door latch releases. Want to lock the car? Place your hand beneath the same character line, but this time behind the door and just in front of the side air inlet.
Granted, it was only a matter of time before door handles joined each respective model line. In 1996, Dodge unveiled the Viper GTS coupe, and exterior door handles joined the party, necessitated by the coupe body style’s hard roof. For 1997, those exterior door releases spread to drop-top models, marking the end of an era. Things lasted shorter at McLaren because the MP4-12C entered production in February 2011, and in 2013, McLaren replaced its swipe-based door releases with rubber buttons. Still, for two brief period of time, two separate supercar makers deleted exterior door handles, and there’s something gloriously bonkers about that.
(Photo credits: Dodge, McLaren)
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