Why debase a satisfying source of interaction like a car door handle?

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.

Let’s categorise for a second. We’ve lived, fairly recently, though a quite settled evolutionary era for door handles. Sanity prevailed. Most cars made in the 2000s had one of those bar- or loop-style handles that stood proud and separate from the door, with a recess behind it to make room for your hand. I call this the ‘grabby’ kind.

Somebody once told me that these were popularised by German brands in the late 1990s because the German emergency services made it known that they liked a door handle they could wrap a rope around and use to heave open a crash-damaged door. Now that makes sense.

There are other kinds, of course, such as the ‘flappy’ ones. The classic. It’s nice to see these making a comeback on the latest Polestars, Minis and a few Porsches, because they are, at least, still moving handles with a physical action. Some of them have to ‘pop out’ electronically before being pulled (and that’s another can of worms), but some of them don’t.

You’ve also got ‘spindly’ ones that sit flat to the door until you press on one end in order to make the other stand proud enough to get a hold of it (Kia EV6, Nissan GT-R). Elegant but a strangely unsatisfying and fiddly designer’s solution, surely, rather than an engineer’s.

Now we also have flappy ones that aren’t actually flappy ones but instead just hand-shaped cavities with a microswitch inside. The Volkswagen ID 7 has them; so do the BMW i7, Fiat 500 and Maserati Granturismo. They’re solid-feeling in one sense, because you’re literally pulling directly on the door panel, but there’s no haptic handle action, just the tiny electronic flick of a release button. Eurgh.

Then there are the hidden ones. The Lotus Evija has a release button squirrelled away in an aero scoop; TVRs used to use a button on the door mirror. Remember the McLaren MP4-12C? You actually had to stroke the door panel just so to get it to open (although they did add a physical button later). I could have wasted hours working out exactly how to get into these cars. I might still be there now.

Worse still, I was once marooned in a wet and cold Welsh quarry for most of an afternoon, locked out of a running Range Rover Evoque, waiting for a man with a crowbar to turn up – all because of a ‘fancy’ motorised door handle. That’s a long story involving a good deal of stupidity on my part and a demanding photographer, but the door handle ultimately caused it.

So why do it? Why mess with something so simple that works so well? Why debase a lovely, satisfying haptic source of interaction with needless electromechanical twattery?

Here’s hoping we’ve passed the nadir of it all and that car makers start listening to firefighters again.