The Fact That Some Modern Electronic Door Latch Systems Use Supercapacitors As Emergency Backups Should Have Stopped All Of This Madness Right Then

Okay, so let’s leave the intricacies of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards for door handle emergency releases for now, which are based on reasonable ideas but are a little beside the point for what I want to address right now. What I want to address now is the fact that, in order to provide the door release mechanism with power, there is an integrated supercapacitor that can be used to provide enough power for some limited number of door release latch usages.

This isn’t even particularly new technology; back in 2019, our own Autopian co-founder, David, wrote about the then-new Ford Mach-e’s electric door handles for The Old Site, noting:

“As for fail-safes, Ford told me each door has super capacitors in it so that, should the latches in the door fail to receive current from the battery (if, for example, the battery is dead), you can still get into the vehicle.”

So, these supercapacitors – which can store electricity in a way roughly analogous to a battery, but non-chemically, and that electricity can only be released in bursts, not gradually – have been crucial parts of emergency electric door handle/latch design for years. What amazes me about all of this is that supercapacitors are still relatively cutting-edge technology. They’ve been around for a bit, sure, and they may not be bleeding edge, but I’d think most people would agree they’re fairly advanced things.

I would have imagined that at some point in the development of these electronic door latch/handle systems, when it became clear that there needed to be backup systems to provide power for the door latches in the event of a power loss, and right after some engineer said hey, we could incorporate a parallel energy-supply system with supercapacitors to act as a backup, I would have thought that someone might have heard that and taken a moment to really think about it and then say something like “Wait, hold up. We want to add a supercapacitor system to open the door? What are we doing here?”

That word “supercapacitor” should have been the wake-up alarm that these engineers and designers needed to hear. As soon as you start talking about adding in a system like that, you would think there would be some bean-counter – perhaps the only time in automotive history I wished people listened to the bean-counters more – that would have put a stop to the conversation and made everyone take a step back and really think about what their goal was here:

To open a door.

Cars have been able to have their doors opened without power (beyond that of a human-supplied yank, squeeze, or twist) for well over a century. This was a staggeringly solved problem. In fact, look at how many ways to solve this problem automakers have come up with in the past few decades:

There are so many ways to make simple mechanical door handles look and work, and they all work great, on cars with power or without. I know there’s a big emphasis on sleekness of look and actual aerodynamics, but if we compare the latest Cherokee’s door handles with the old Grand Cherokee door handles, is it really all that much better?

I’m just not sold that anything that great has been accomplished here, considering all the complexity that has been added. And besides, if you want minimalistic and sleek door handles, that’s been figured out already, decades ago. Here are some examples, along with one of the few times an electric door opening system made sense (BMW Z1 drop-down doors, just for the drama):

 

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I can’t think of a recent automotive trend that has been as universally disliked and unwanted as these powered door handles. The supercapacitor detail just really drove that home for me in a visceral way. It’s adding components and complexity to fix a problem that doesn’t even need to exist at all. And what about as these cars age and need repair? Supercapacitors aren’t particularly dangerous, but if you’re working on the door, it’s not impossible that one could short one out and get a pretty good jolt, and one that could be unexpected, since they’re designed to work when the car has no power otherwise.

Also, how many times have you actually ever had a door handle fail on your car, interior or exterior? And of those times, how often was the failure just from cheap plastics used for the pull handles themselves? The actual latching mechanisms themselves tend to be pretty bulletproof. Go to a junkyard, and I suspect most of the cars there that haven’t been mangled in a wreck will still have working door handles. I really can’t stress enough just how much of a solved problem this was.

There’s a big lesson here, and I really hope carmakers are learning it. A shocking amount of research and development has been poured into mechanisms that add nothing to the driving experience, and, if anything, have made driving less safe and more of a hassle. It’s taken the threat of making these types of handles illegal in places like China to really get the attention of automakers, and I just hope they listen.

This is very similar to the backlash against all-touchscreen controls and the push to bring back physical controls: in both cases, it’s a situation where technology was available to do something that perhaps looked or felt cool in some auto show context or in a commercial, but in the reality of living with a car, is just an unwanted mess and hassle.

Maybe this is just a process we have to work through to get past. Perhaps it’s just human nature to be so dazzled by the new that all logic flees, but I would hope that we have the capacity to return to our senses. Making great cars does not mean re-inventing solutions to every problem. Sometimes it makes sense to reevaluate how things are done, but sometimes it makes more sense to just accept what works, what has proven itself over and over again, and is just fine.

Nobody was clamoring for more complex door opening systems. People weren’t backing out of buying a car because the way they opened the door didn’t require as much thought as they were hoping, or wouldn’t be confusing enough in an emergency, or didn’t require high-tech equipment to save their asses if something went wrong.

The whole car industry went down the wrong path here, put too much effort into things that just don’t matter, and made everything worse as a result. Let’s just hope they realize it and move on to something better. Like in-car trash management!