Flush door handles are the car industry’s latest safety problem - Ars Technica

As pointed out in one of the many other threads about this article — mechanical flush handles aren’t the problem. Motor-driven electronic handles are.

During heavy rain, flush-fit door handles have short-circuited, trapping people in their cars.

This whole thing roots back to Elon Musk being a twat.

He had a habit, in the early days of his involvement with Tesla, of demanding some particular change to the design (and being able to make it stick because of his position) because it would be "more awesome" in his mind. There were a bunch of them, which wasted millions of dollars even back in those much smaller-scale days, and the whole "electronic door handles" thing is that. It's obviously worse in pretty much every way (among them cost, reliability, and safety), but he thought it would be awesome, and he's a self-important blockhead who can't hear any criticism, and so here we are.

Door handles are a safety feature to open a stuck door with force from the outside. This has been common knowledge (at least in the German car industry) for years. Google some pictures of expensive German cars like Porsche 911, VW Phaeton, BMW 7 and others. Almost all of them have door handles.

Would the designers imagine it without handles and clean lines? You bet. Google Audi Design study: no handles at all.

Why do cars keep taking 2 steps forward, one step backwards?