QOTD: Is Your Heart Open to These Doors?
What is it about suicide doors? Some 47 years after the last pair of full-size, rear-hinged doors faded from the domestic automobile landscape, we continue lusting after them. And automakers continue teasing us with sedans that open like a barn. Remember Lincoln’s go-nowhere Continental concept of the early 2000s? That’s just one of many pieces of vaporware boasting throwback doors that never went anywhere.
Next to narrow, barely-there side mirrors and ridiculously oversized wheels, suicide (aka clamshell, aka coach-style) doors are the design feature a good concept cannot go without, even though the audience has no expectation of ever seeing them in a showroom. Kia saw fit to install them on its Telluride concept. A three-row SUV, fer chrissakes. We’d probably be annoyed with them by now, were it not for Rolls-Royce’s resurrection of this vintage method of ingress/egress.
Are you as afflicted with suicide door love as this writer?
I’ll admit I love them. I want to see them return, though the declining sedan market lends serious doubt to my dream of a so-equipped passenger car generating enough volume to make them a regular sight on North American roads. Hope is everlasting, though.
In their absence, even the half-doors on the Saturn Ion quad coupe and Honda Element and Ford F-150 SuperCab give me a Chris Matthews-style tingle.
Once commonplace in the 1920s through early 50s, the last (domestic) gasp for these doors came in the heady 1960s — Lincoln’s heyday. Ford’s luxury division catapulted them to iconic status during that decade, while its parent brand repurposed them for a little-remembered variant of the Thunderbird for model years 1967 to 1971. Seen here is a ’68 I stumbled across near the Vermont border on Labor Day.
Late Thursday, Lincoln implied we might see these doors again. It’s looking like there’s a refresh afoot for the slow-selling Continental that incorporates these doors, which seems a little like desperation on Ford’s part. If true, are we to view this decision with cynicism? It would be an attempt to mine the public’s fondness for the ’61-’69 Conti in order to fan the dying embers of a model surely destined for discontinuation. So many emotions at play right now…
But we’re not specifically talking Lincoln here. No, today we want you to describe how — and why — you feel a continued pull for these doors (assuming, of course, that you do).
[Images: Steph Willems/TTAC]
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I won't argue they don't have their drawbacks, but at curb-side they're a huge advantage.
There's an often overlooked utility available with suicide doors. A friend of mine had a late '40 Chrysler with such doors. He'd have the rear seat passengers pop 'em open at speed every once in a while to allow the 50 or 60 mph air to blow all the crap out of the car (soda cans, fast food containers, etc.). The downside was that the doors became speed brakes and would markedly slow the car down...