Design over function was always a bad choice.
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.
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.
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.
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 celebrate 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?
Mandated rear view cameras came from recommendations from a series of particularly tragic coroner’s inquests.
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.
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.
Sooooooo pointless.
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.
