This will be a relatable truth to anyone who’s ever made the mistake of looking at their own years-old social media posts, but life is all about improvement. Things we once did, opinions we once held, and yes, words we once used may no longer hold water or be looked upon favorably today. But as long as we recognize the error in our ways and correct ourselves going forward, it’s fine. That’s life.
With all that in mind, I come before you today to formally point out one car-related colloquialism that should probably be retired for reasons that are obvious once you’ve actually thought about it for more than two seconds: “suicide doors.” Even if you’re not a car expert, you probably know the term. It refers to the doors on a car that open the opposite way they usually do—insides facing forward, not back—but their common name needlessly invokes a very morbid and very real mental health issue.
According to J.D. Power, the term was popularized by Ralph Nader in his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed: The Dangers of the American Automobile. That style of door was a lot more popular back then, but cars were also getting faster, making them actual safety hazards—hence the alarmist but mostly well-meaning moniker.
Modern car doors rarely swing this way, but when they do, we have technology like latches and locks that keep them in place, so the danger Nader was trying to convey is no longer relevant. And as Jason eloquently points out in Slack, the name was never even factually that accurate. “They were never really suicide, logically, because they got the name because the wind would catch them and they’d fly open; so it was more of a manslaughter door.”
Instead, I think we should borrow from the world of interior design (and refrigerators), where there is indeed a very simple name for a pair of doors that open like the ones on the car above: French doors. After all, if Whirlpool can figure out how to make its opposing-hinged products sound classy, Ferrari probably deserves the same dignity.
Topshot: Lincoln
Trap doors – because if you open the front and rear doors at the same time in a parking lot next to another car, you are trapped! Oh wait, that’s taken.
Front opening doors?
Huh, I always thought the term referred to a lack of structural strength from not having a fixed B pillar. Obviously you can solve that by reinforcing the front and rear doors where they overlap. I took it to mean that even with the laughable crash standards from the old days it was understood that having this completely open space right in the center of the passenger compartment created a potential safety issue.
I don’t know, I feel like that’s being a little overly sens–
Oh, f— that guy, we gotta rename these things right away.
Never liked the term when describing the doors on a car; Ranger or Saturn or whatever. Always associated it with the Continental, which a commentator mentioned it should be called just that: “Continental doors.”
Anyway, came here to say, sorry if I piss off anyone, can we please stop overusing the phrase “mental health.” As someone that’s seen 6 people leave this world and having an issue himself, this term seems to put the blame on the individual, rather than the environment (society) that creates the problem.
My employer recently tried suspending me without pay pending a psychological evaluation just for barely mentioning my thoughts. Really? So I have to go see a doctor to tell me it’s a “me” problem and get prescribed a psychoactive substance to blur my mind to cope with the bull shit of society?!
I bring this up because I’m afraid to express any true beliefs about this out of fear for that term: YOU have a mental health problem. I don’t have the problem, society has the f’n problem. Corporations and shiesty fuckers want every last dollar, jobs treat you like crap, neighbors gossip and start rumors to tarnish your character as a human being, law enforcement wants to jam you up your shit for every mistake you’ve been branded with, people you love disappear.
There’s people out there that really need some love, not blame. It’s a “lost hope” because problem, not a “mental health” problem.
… why am I thinking about this on a car site? Can someone write something about a transit bus
It’s easy to look around and think that the world is going to shit. And perhaps in several ways, it is. At the very least, the absolute minimum, you’ve got a community of like minded friends here on this site.
Now, just go search for everything written by Mercedes and there’s bound to be some transit bus stuff you may have missed.
One would think that in the era of seat belts, those doors would not be very dangerous, even if one were to pop open on the freeway. That would just result in a damaged door, not a passenger voluntarily jumping out of the car. It was always a misnomer.
My MG replica has rear-hinged doors, which are kind of cool, but other than the uniqueness factor, are just doors. They do not seem dangerous at all, any more than normal doors.
From what my grandfather told me, the “suicide” part was if someone had their hand on the door while moving, the force of the air could pull the door open and the person with it if the latch failed, which was apparently not as uncommon as it should have been. He didn’t have a car with such doors when he had kids, but one of my aunts fell out on a turn once even with regular doors. He thinks she was leaning on the door handle, but she claimed it just opened. It was low speed, so she wasn’t hurt.
Wow you actually tagged this under “suicide”. I think this is much more disrespectful than the term suicide doors. Please do better.
I suppose this is automation or (God forbid) AI. But you have a point, this tag is not in good taste.
Have you tried… not being offended?
They aren’t suicide doors till they have AR-15’s in them, imo.
-signed, someone whose brother shot himself with one
(He loved that piece of shit Tiburon, which he sold deeply underwater to get a piece of shit Dart. He might be dead, but I still haven’t forgiven him for losing a Petit Le Mans ticket between the box office and the parking lot. Seriously.)
Death doors is probably accurate.
No amount of locks or “security” features are going to stop that door from killing you if a car hits it on the side of a highway.
That being said, suicide doors are better in pretty much every other metric that isn’t “massacres the passengers on impact”
Backwards doors.
I’m reminded of when Rolls-Royce came out with powered self-closing doors. My Toyota Yaris already had those! Because they were hinged the normal way, to operate them you had to let the clutch back in just a little bit faster than smooth, and inertia and the little bit of wind you get accelerating from 0 to 2 mph do their thing and close the door for you.
French doors is what they call them in houses.
On the other hand some 2CVs have front doors that hinge in the front, and some that hinge in the back. Some have back doors hinge in the front, and some that hinge in the back. The front that hinge in the back with back doors that hinge in the front are particularly amusing. As far as I know, none have both front and back that hinge in the back, but I would not be surprised.
What about 2 door cars that hinge in the back?
For your honorable and ethical crusade, I would think master & slave cylinder and MSTP in network communication would be much higher in the pile.
Suicide doors? Change it to whatever you want , the people that were affected by it will still get the underlying meaning.
I mean it’s a car site here…
I still don’t get what was wrong with uncle Ben’s rice and the pancake lady.
Is the perfect future is like Demolition Man where offense words generate fines immediately? LOL
I was curious about this a while back and saw there is at least some attempt in IT and electrical fields to get away from master/slave and male/female to describe plug types. That’s good. Just because some idiot 100 years ago saw a connector and couldn’t help but thinking about genitalia does not mean we have to continue to follow said idiot. It’s dumb and it’s ok to leave dumb things behind.
I think you’re also creating a straw man. You can call the dumb doors whatever you want. No one is saying you’re not allowed to. This is just an author saying “that thing you say might cause people pain” and most of us saying “wow never thought about that. I don’t like inadvertently causing people pain and will now think about that.” Mixed with a handful of “people with dead kids need to get over it and it’s super important to me to be able to call a thing I never talk about what people called it 100 years ago.”
Heinlein coined the term ‘Waldo’ for human augmented cybernetics, Good as any.
Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima have connotations of slavery.
Most certainly, saw this decades ago.
We switched to main and secondary nearly 10 years ago so your first example sounds hella dated to me.
I’m in the HVACR business and all the top companies still use it today.
This being an auto website however, what about in automotive usage?
Again, all the places I’ve worked for or with made the choice to stop using the terms “master and slave” years ago. I can’t speak to your experience, only mine. You seemed to be suggesting there has no been call to stop using those terms and that changing those terms would seem like higher priority than stopping use of “suicide doors”. All I’m saying is that in my experience, yes it was higher priority and has already been happening. Not saying it’s completely changed everywhere, but the notion that it hasn’t already started happening is false.
You are free to use whichever words you like. But you don’t HAVE to. This article points to the implications/innacuracies and suggest alternatives.
But feel free to reference suicide and slavery all you like, no one will be fining you. But no one is “sticking to sports” either. Don’t be a Herb 🙂
Got it. So what about master & slave cylinders? These words could be triggering as well.
Primary and secondary describe it better, and the term isn’t exactly triggering, just bad taste. But, again, you do you.
I nominate fly doors.
The logic:
You know how there are the guys that step up to the urinal and just unzip (or unbutton if they are doing cowboy cosplay) and then there are those that that have to undo their belt and pretty much drop their pants to their knees?
Is this a relevant analogy? Well no, but it is fly.
Also some of the time those doors sort of look like fly wings when they are open.
Pedestrian Harvesters.
You win the internet today
Probably kinder to cyclists though.
Oddly enough, here in Poland we call them “hencatchers” (or “kurołapy”).
Clamshell doors…?
As a follically challenged man, I think it’s high time we quit referring to old tires as “bald.” Nobody knows my pain.
And not technically accurate. Bald tires still have rubber on them just no treads. On the other hand…
My head is slick, yours can be too.
I’m still waiting for my “poor man’s toupee” the Autopian hat.
Don’t get me started on
dead man’s brakeFull Self Driving…Hey, how about scotch tape!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_tape
Whilst living in Illinois, I attended Carmel High School – a Catholic school. All my classmates in 8th grade that were going to the secular high school called us “Fudgies” in some lame attempt at denigrating us.
I gave up trying to tell them they were stupid, since caramel and fudge are different things.
Similarly, I never understood the meaning of calling rear-hinged doors suicide doors, as injuries caused by them malfunctioning are/were accidental, not a sadly willful act.
Both scenarios only prove how unoriginal a lot of people are in naming things.
Put them on tracks and you have elevator doors.
Mans Laughter doors.
Isn’t the best answer right in the first photo?
Continental doors.
Lemming doors. Or, a more useful term: backswing doors.
Saloon doors aka old western doors but also date back to the saloon car days.
The term “rear-hinged doors” may be inelegantly utilitarian but it works.
How would the term “French doors” work in France? Ha, I have a French car myself and it has rear-hinged doors; one could say it has French doors not because of wherever the hinges might be but because the car itself is French and so its doors are French, lol. My car is a 1954 Panhard Dyna Z where the *front* doors are rear-hinged while the *rear* doors are front-hinged. So it doesn’t fit the American definition of French doors…
While this is actually a 1960 Panhard PL17 and not a Dyna Z it’s the same re: doors (surprisingly no pics online of Dyna Zs with all their doors open, at least so far): https://s1.cdn.autoevolution.com/images/news/gallery/superb-panhard-pl17-tigre-is-for-sale-in-texas_4.jpg
Do you want Freedom Doors? Jk
French doors aren’t called French anything in French. They’re called “window doors” (portes-fenêtres).
You know what we call bacon in Canada? Bacon.
Right, but the French don’t call French doors doors, they call them “window-doors.” So it’s like Canadians calling Canadian bacon “pig bacon” or something.
I don’t understand the stigma. If your friends drag you to a party, and you don’t want to be at that party, you leave at your first opportunity.
I think it’s pandering to change the name but I have no strong attachment to the term and wouldn’t protest a change. Coach doors it is.
Hey maybe Crack Pipe doors, I understand that term is no longer being used in the auto industry. Jk
Yeah, never cared for that term so I rarely used it in the past and haven’t used it lately.
Plenty of people may be fine with using the term; in fact some may even brag about how they’ve never been triggered by it despite having personal experience with friends or family. However, words do indeed matter and it’s just basic human decency to make adjustments to one’s language as an act of kindness.
People who protest against making such adjustments are pretty much admitting that they don’t want to be arsed about the aforementioned basic human decency and attendant kindness…
Well I agree with nothing wrong with the English language adapting and I hold no strong attachments to the terms. However I do think switching everything in the English language yearly to adapt to terms that are not adhered in the language reverses the intention of language and that is to communicate clearly.
“Everything” and “yearly” is false.
It’s not new and it happens whether you want to or not. Remember a while back when Dr Seuss & co said they’d no longer be publishing some book no one had ever heard of? Politicians got big mad and started reading Cat in the Hat on the floors of Congress. There’s a reason they read Cat in the Hat and not the actual book in question: that one was full of crazy racist shit they didn’t wanna say. No one had to “cancel” that book for them to move beyond it — it just happened.
Ideas and languages evolve. For some reason it used to be ok to describe someone getting really upset as “going postal.” It could have been updated to “going Columbine” but fortunately we all realized on our own that joking about mass shootings is distasteful.
Coach doors may be most accurate.