Testing, testing

“Why debase a lovely, satisfying source of interaction?”

- MATT SAUNDERS

This is a dismayingly experimental period when it comes to one particular aspect of car design that impacts upon absolutely all of us: door handles.

My god. I feel like I used to understand them. Now I'm just utterly bemused. It's the exterior kind that we will concern ourselves with. Door handles are important. Chassis engineers sometimes talk about the first 50 yards of a car's driving experience acting as a dynamic handshake of a sort. Well, maybe, but action of the door handle is a physical, almost literal one. Get it right and you set the tone perfectly for what's about to transpire; get it wrong and the driver is vexed before even getting on board. And there seem to be far, far fewer ways to get it right than wrong, so why 'innovate'?

The best door handle I ever knew belonged to a late-1980s, W126-generation Mercedes-Benz 560 SEC. It was hefty and mechanical, smooth and oily feeling in its action; like the car, it felt like it might weather a nuclear winter as if it were a gentle summer shower. The only thing that gets close to it on a current production model is the super-sturdy push-button one on, not so coincidentally, the Mercedes-Benz G-Class.