Say what you will about Saturday Night Live, but every once in a while, it comes out with an absolute banger. The long-running live NBC sketch comedy show often airs satirical musical performances in addition to letting its actual musical guests perform, and its latest ballad paints a target on a widely disdained piece of modern automotive design: Door handles.
As a car enthusiast who obsesses over everything automobile and spends many hours a day online, it’s easy to assume that some complaints are limited to die-hards and critics like myself. For years, people in my circles complained about how modern door handle designs, both inside and outside of the car, are becoming pointlessly complex. It was only a few months ago that regulators in China revealed they’re considering banning flush door handles due to their complexity and oftentimes obscure designs.
By now, it’s obvious that it’s not just gearheads who think normal door handles were a solved issue. Ask anyone who’s interacted with a strange, pointlessly engineered electric door release or flush exterior handle, and they’ll probably have a strong opinion about it.
This SNL sketch, embedded below, exemplifies those opinions clearly. The song was set to air this past Saturday, but was cut for time. Thankfully, instead of locking it away on a hard drive somewhere in 30 Rock, NBC published it to the show’s YouTube channel the next morning to give car designers a piece of their mind.
The clip features cast members Jane Wickline and Veronika Slowikowska, with a special appearance by Heated Rivalry star Connor Storrie, the week’s celebrity guest host. It starts off depicting the two women getting into an Uber after a night of partying. But when they try to exit the car, they struggle to figure out what should be the extremely simple process of opening the door to exit, arguing with the “driver” for over 20 seconds.
The car in question is a Mustang Mach-E, a vehicle that, very famously, doesn’t have any real door handles. Instead, to get in, you push a button on the window frame and use a fixed winglet-looking handle to pull it out and gain access. There aren’t any traditional handles inside, either. To get out, you have to pull a lever that’s hidden within the door pull area:
In addition to calling out button-style doors, the song goes on to criticize “squeeze” handles, where, instead of a traditional handle, there’s a big mechanism hidden in the door card to actuate the door opening. Not to keep ragging on Ford, but this is a mainstay feature on trucks like the Ranger and the F-150.
While handles like this might seem obvious to those who have owned vehicles with them equipped, I distinctly remember wasting 30 seconds trying to get out of the last F-150 I drove simply because I couldn’t find the handle (location called out below). Is that partially due to my own stupidity? Certainly. But even the dimmest among us shouldn’t have to search for a door handle or figure out how to use it. Like I said earlier, this is supposed to be a solved issue!
Before the two women storm into the offices of “Big Car” to confront the CEO (played by Storrie) about handle design and the storyline goes off the rails, they also briefly call out Tesla’s flush door handles, which are currently the subject of a federal investigation. In addition to being confusing to use from the outside, the door is normally actuated by a button on the inside, which could stop working in the event of a crash. There’s a backup release built into the door, but it can be tough to find, which isn’t ideal when you’ve just been involved in a wreck and are otherwise trapped.
Tesla isn’t the only automaker that uses electric door handles, obviously. Heck, the Corvette has been doing it for over 20 years. I’m kind of sad SNL didn’t call out the Lexus NX, which has a handle design that’s so counterintuitive that the manufacturer needed to put a sticker on the inside to explain how to use it. My colleague Jason wrote a whole thing about this, and even made a video about it:
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It’s possible that if enough automakers transition to electric door handles, people will eventually get used to them. I have a much simpler idea: Everyone should just go back to normal, mechanical door handles. Problem solved.
Top graphic images: Saturday Night Live/Youtube
Some of my family was on the way to Thanksgiving a couple of years ago when their Lexus SUV killed its drained battery with a failed startup. Having electric door latches, they were stuck inside the vehicle. Even with full WiFi to look up the instructions, and some very tech savy, educated people, it took a half hour to figure it out. (You need to reach up into the armrest from below and pull the handle twice in quick succession; not once, and not once, pause, and then again.)
It was definitely too complicated, and I’d never want to figure it out while in an emergency or while in shock after an accident.
Sadly, I can’t tell if the satire in the SNL piece is directed at door handles, or the crappy state of modern music.
Burn Auto-Tune with fire.
Yes! Burn Auto-Tune with the fire of a thousand suns!
Something new just for the sake of it being new is just marketing garbage. If new is better that is one thing but new for novelty is just stylistic waste.
old thinking: how are we gonna safely hide the door-opening mechanism behind the door card?
new thinking: how are we gonna safely hide the door-opening mechanism behind the paywall?
This was a great skit / musical bit.
I can usually figure out door handles in the daylight, but in the dark an oddball system can be pretty inscrutable. The parity actually caught this well.
The reveal of “Big Car” CEO’s childhood door handle trauma was hilarious – and also not farther, as I have hooked my clothes on some of the old school door handles too.
And yeah – some things are “solved problems.” We don’t really need every car to have a different way of starting the car, activating headlights, windshield wipers and washers, or shifting gears, let alone door handles.
Most ridiculous thing to know is that even if a new car has a popper, I think they are still required to also have a manual release.
Think about that.
They HAVE TO have 2 ways of opening the door when they add these stupid poppers in. And these car companies are always complaining about rising costs. Well go back to just having a manual release.
FFS
My ’67 Chevy II has very conventional-looking door handles including pushbutton releases on the outside like almost every ’60s GM. The inside has levers that operate similar to the nearby window cranks. The back doors have typical plunger locks, but the front doors have something unique. There’s a small rotary knob to twist for unlock, but its shape does not engender rotating it the opposite way to lock.
In fact, pushing DOWN on the door release lever LOCKS the front doors. The frustrating part is that pulling up afterward (normally opens the door) does not unlock the door. You have to twist that unique rotary knob.
Now, it’s never occurred to me to push down to open the door. The physics of exerting force to open it kinda make pulling up advantageous. But my wife, kids and other passengers are always pushing down, requiring a tutorial to escape. So why did Chevy put this bizarre mechanism on their economy car? Bonus fact: locking from the inside is “different” than locking the door with a key from the outside. It’s mechanical showing off…or black magic!
My ’63 Travelall is the same way. I haven’t put it to the test with unfamiliar passengers, but it will be interesting to see the results.
You all may mock Jeeps but CJs and wranglers had very useful door handles.
Buy old cars. Its the Autopian way
Yes, that is the way. But for those who want new, we also shouldn’t have to deal with this shit.
Its the Muskification of the automobile. Any stupid idea that clown had to make things more difficult and less intuitive, he forced it onto Tesla engineers, and unfortunately the rest of the industry copied them.
But new cars will be old cars, so we need to keep this stupidity out of new cars before they become old cars.
I am perfectly happy to drive ever older cars. One of mine is 52 this year, and I have owned it for 30 years.
This is why I prefer classic cars. I’ll just sit back in the relative safety/top notch door functionality of a Bricklin SV-1.
The Ford thing where they put it in the armrest is pretty useful since it means you don’t have to move from the handle to a grab bar to push it open, but it looks like they got rid of the physical latch? If so, I have to ask: Did someone watch people trying to find the hidden release on the back hatch of a crossover and think “What if that, but inside?”
When will China come to our aid for interior door handles?
Or is this all part of their master plan to steal hockey from Canada by trapping the players in their cars?
This is new? Burying the interior door release in the armrest has been going on for decades. My Volvo 1800ES was that way, as were plenty of other cars.
I considered how long it took to open the door a test of intellect for my front seat passenger in my ’89 240DL.
It’s one thing when it’s auto rags and enthusiast websites complaining, but when Saturday Night Live starts riffing on your design choices, maybe it’s time for a rethink.
Or if you’re James Cameron, angrily double down and insist no, it’s the children who are wrong.
(Insert Principal Skinner gif.)