I once pulled over to help a stranded Model S driver with a flat tire in the Mojave desert. Every door handle had a zip tie hanging off it because they _all_ had failed present mechanisms.
Junk
So, yes, I think you're right that they are largely just a gimmick.
Side bonus, smaller wheels with taller sidewall tires are more comfortable, less prone to damage, and the tires are cheaper and easier to replace, too!
At speed, most of your power is going to fight drag, so aerodynamics make a much bigger difference in efficiency.
Tesla did it to be different, futuristic, and to show off. Then plenty of other electric vehicle manufacturers copied. Even ignoring the safety issues, these things had reliability problems since almost inception and could be frozen shut in the winter.
Between the door handles, removing the turn signal stalk, removing the wiper stalk, non-round non-drive-by-wire wheel, and now putting the shifter in the ceiling, Tesla has made a lot of unforced errors to try to stand out.
They what?! And people are still buying these things? This is the most valuable automaker in the world?
You're not helping bro. I'm literally crying right now what even is this car?
When that frames how you imagine drivers of your vehicles interfacing with them, all sorts of stupid shit starts looking like a good idea.
This isn't a perfect comparison. You could design car handles that look like little parachutes attached to something with the drag profile of a dolphin, but that's not a likely situation. In general, the area of the rest of the car is going to be many thousands of times that of the door handle. Given the difficulties in measuring, let alone modeling, turbulent air flow, it would be hard to detect a door handle's drag compared to the rest of the car.
I guess you could attach a meter to the door handle itself to detect how much drag it experiences from its own perspective, and that'd be pretty accurate. My hunch is it'd be an insignificant rounding error compared to the rest of the system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK0MxfPE4N0&pp=ygUWbmlzc2FuI...
(Granted, they're damned nice wheels. When people compliment the car in a parking lot, they usually talk about the wheels.)
At some point, convenience routs safety, and the consumers have spoken
>You cannot open car WINDOWS under water, electric or not.
>Nobody suggested opening the door. Not even sure how you got there
Uh, you aren't sure how I got there because I didn't. I never even said the word door.
You cannot roll down manual car windows in a sunken car because the pressure of the water jams the mechanism regardless of what powers that mechanism. In a still sinking car, electric windows do not short out and you can roll them down just fine.