Interesting video on the background of the crazy flush door handle trend with new cars...

Door handles are one of those engineering problems with a lot of constraints and a lot of prior art. They need to: 1. Fit the human hand. All sizes and shapes of hand, hands with gloves, hands with varying numbers of fingers, etc. Be positioned on the car in a reasonable way, not have sharp edges. If a human can’t operate the door handle then it is useless. 2. Be safe and reliable. Robust mechanisms, retain function when crashed, will withstand half a million cycles, consistent and predictable. Hold up to weather, ice, water, heat, cold. Those sorts of things. 3. Be aerodynamic and light. Small percent gains matter on cars these days as the shapes we use get more and more refined. EVs are heavy but efficiency is important to them still. 4. Have aesthetic properties. Integrate with the car’s design language, be pleasing to look at. There are more than a few door handles today that fail pretty high on this list. That’s super embarrassing, it means that somebody who gets paid too much money put form over function in an egregious way. I think there’s some merit to the idea of the car not opening the door when it thinks things are unsafe. However, if it makes the door worse in fundamental everyday ways then it isn’t worthwhile. If the door is making decisions it needs a lot of layers of design and engineering. Does it fail safe, how do you override in a panic, what does disclosure of the no-open condition look like? I don’t think anybody has nailed this yet.