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Flush door handles are the car industry’s latest safety problem
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/09/flush-door-handles-are-the-car-industrys-latest-safety-problem/
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dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️The issue isn't flush fitting handles, it's electronic flush fitting handles. I don't know who first signed off on that idea but they should have been slapped upside the head with a rubber chicken.
It's trivial to design a flush handle that's all mechanical and isn't loaded with finicky electronics. Hell, those even show up on dishwashers now.
You have ford doing all sorts of weird stuff to recall over their mach e that has no exterior handles, no key cylinder. If you are outside the car and the car is dead, then you have to first get and wires out of the front bumper, then attach a jump pack to pop the hood, then remove some covers then jump the 12v battery, then you can open the door.
Meanwhile I had both my fib dead and a dead car battery in my 2015, and I .. popped off the cover for the backup key cylinder and just opened the car ..
All I want is the styling of the 90s, the hybrid system of a 2025 Prius Prime, and the spyware of a Model T
artyomThe issue isn't flush fitting handles, it's electronic
flush fittinghandles
FTFY
Tesla was the first to make it popular in modern vehicles iirc
Lots of cars have had flush handles. Most early 2000 GM w-bodies did and those were common af. The silly electic ones may be what Tesla popularized at best... But even so a few cars had electric pop out, but flush handles. Perhaps its bad safety designs they've popularized.
Flush handles (called shaved handles or hidden handles) were a fad in the custom car and hot rod scenes for a very long time before Tesla used them.
UsernameblankfaceI thought it should be easy to do a mechanical flush handle. At the very least, a mechanical backup way to open the door in one step should be mandatory
As much as I like the look of flush door handles, I don't like the idea of reaching my fingers inside of a thing that opens and closes electronically.
How many miles of range would we lose by having regular old fashioned door handles, anyway?
For Tesla model 3 and y, the handle itself is mechanical. You push on one side to make the handle pop out. If you do it right, the motion is similar to door handles with buttons: your thumb presses the “button” and your hand pulls the handle
As pointed out in one of the many other threads about this article — mechanical flush handles aren’t the problem. Motor-driven electronic handles are.
Door handles are a safety feature to open a stuck door with force from the outside. This has been common knowledge (at least in the German car industry) for years. Google some pictures of expensive German cars like Porsche 911, VW Phaeton, BMW 7 and others. Almost all of them have door handles.
Would the designers imagine it without handles and clean lines? You bet. Google Audi Design study: no handles at all.
During heavy rain, flush-fit door handles have short-circuited, trapping people in their cars.
This whole thing roots back to Elon Musk being a twat.
He had a habit, in the early days of his involvement with Tesla, of demanding some particular change to the design (and being able to make it stick because of his position) because it would be "more awesome" in his mind. There were a bunch of them, which wasted millions of dollars even back in those much smaller-scale days, and the whole "electronic door handles" thing is that. It's obviously worse in pretty much every way (among them cost, reliability, and safety), but he thought it would be awesome, and he's a self-important blockhead who can't hear any criticism, and so here we are.
Why do cars keep taking 2 steps forward, one step backwards?
Money. Charge for useless features, then charge more to let people buy out of them.
Fuck the following:
Flush door handles
Tablet screens that are not integrated into the dashboard
Motorized air vents
Glove box doors that require using the infotainment to open
A lack of keyholes or metal keys for at least one door
Cars that cannot be put into neutral without power
All the goddamn telemetry that you can't shut off
Subscriptions for basic features
Aaos in any car
Gear shifters that are entirely non intuitive
I bought a 20 year old pick up with no radio, and I still feel like it has too many features.
Motorized air vents
Excuse me say what? And here I am, mad as hell at modern vents that only shift a few degrees up/down, left/right. The vents in my 20-yo car and truck rotate 360° and open almost 90°.
It gives them something else to fix and make money on when it breaks. Traditional headlight bulbs are like $10-20 and easy to replace, but newer LED headlight harnesses and their replacement can be hundreds.
EtnapheleLEDs have so many superior properties and don’t burn out nearly as often though. I have a car with automatic matrix high beams and it’s a godsend for night driving. I would give credit where it’s due.
Because there are no innovations left to make, the design of a car is pretty well established.
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It's interesting to see that China is taking this seriously and might ban them, while the US forgets more and more about "car safety".
If China bans it, most manufacturers will have to follow their rules if they want to sell cars there, including Tesla.
It's not much in the grand scheme of things but it's nice to see that at least one major country is considering this.
I first became aware of that when I learned the US allows cars to use blinking rear brake lights instead of actual separate blinker lights, for the sake of design. It's completely insane.
They take this urgent issue so seriously that they will ban… new cars being made with this feature… by 2027! Great, after all only… peoples safety is in question!
Its a step into the right direction, but are we really in a world where we are to celebrate common sense decisions?
2027 is only 1 model year away (2026 cars are already being sold). It took fucking forever for rear cameras to be mandated in the USA by comparison
I don’t get how that is comparably significant… Are the rear views of pickup trucks that obstructed?
The whole truck bed and the height of the vehicle would obstruct basically a tons of stuff, making it a massive blindspot. Lots of accident/collision happened because driver reversed into someone/something.
This sort of door handle, while it's unsafe in certain condition, is lower in priority than those that would cause harm to someone other than the driver. Eliminating blind spot should be in the top priority of automobile maker.
Mandated rear view cameras came from recommendations from a series of particularly tragic coroner's inquests.
Its hardly surprising, the US has shit consumer protections and I would have presumed that attitude went for health and safety too.
That said they can fit different handles if they wanted to, I am sure there are a lot of differentiators across markets.
Maybe I’m being too pedantic, but the headline is flush door handles, but the concern is electric latches and maybe electric handles. I wish newswriters care enough to be accurate.
Design over function was always a bad choice.
Unsolving problems previously solved has been a staple of the (mostly EV) car industry for awhile now.
It’s been a staple of every industry.
(Rant below)
There was a period of time, not so long ago, when the vast majority of our daily activities problems were actually pretty well solved. The machines weren’t necessarily the most efficient in materials and energy usage, but they were reliable. And if they broke, most were simple enough to visually break down and understand their functions inherently.
Then, the problem started when companies realized that they were making their stuff too sturdy. There was one legitimate crowd who wanted to cut down on the resource usage. They wanted to bring the devices away from maximization and down to moderation. I agree with that crowd.
Then there were the exploiters. They saw this opportunity and ran with it. The cheaper you can make your product, just to work long enough for you to develop the next model, you could drip-feed your customers garbage year over year.
This went the opposite direction and backfired on the legitimate crowd. Now we use three times as many resources as we once did because they treat everything made for us as expendable. Waste is a good thing to them. The more we throw away the garbage the sooner we replace it.
Sooooooo pointless.