'Can you ever enjoy a car if it doesn't have good door handles?'
A car’s on-limit behaviour is one thing, but Richard Porter has another important criterion
You can worry about tip-in and toe-out and lift-on under-overing – goodness knows at evo we really do – but can you ever truly enjoy a car if it doesn’t have good door handles?
A car’s outside door handle is one of the most vital things about it, and not just because it allows you to get in. It’s also the car’s handshake and, on first acquaintance, the very first thing you’re going to touch. Apart from, maybe, the key, and that’s a whole separate minefield of flunked first impressions. A weak or wobbly exterior handle sets a tone for a car that you can’t shake from the back of your mind, no matter how electrifying the performance or enervating the handling. Conversely, a good handle subconsciously sends the right vibes tingling up your fingers, telling you encouraging things about the quality of the engineering in the rest of the car.
Take the Porsche 911, for example. It’s been a favourite of anyone who really cares about cars for 60-odd years and that’s not just down to its whirring flat-sixes and unusual weight distribution. It’s because the 911 has always had a ruddy good door handle.
The original air-cooled cars featured a series of proper trigger handles, each feeling like they were doing something really important, and it helped that 911s from 1963 until 1998 had door fits frequently described as ‘vault-like’. I’ve never closed a bank vault, and a congenital fear of things that could take your fingers off means I probably never will, but let’s assume this is accurate because hefty, thunky door-shuts are another way in which a car can convince you it’s well engineered and built for the distance even before you’ve put your seat belt on.
When the 996 came along it didn’t have such a sturdy quality to the way its doors closed home, not least because the move to frameless windows made everything feel a bit wobbly, but the handle, though it switched to a disappointingly meek-looking flap, had a tightness and precision that kept your faith in Porsche’s engineering ability. Though clearly Porsche itself didn’t agree with this because when 996 became 997 it sprung for a new handle design on the carryover door, this time a pull-out. And, it pains me to say, it was probably the worst 911 handle to date. Admittedly this might be tainted by the 997 I used to own on which the handle once failed in a petrol station, let down by a weak plastic part deep within the mechanism, though I wasn’t to know this at the time and nor were all the onlookers watching some berk with a Porsche clumsily getting into his driver’s seat from the passenger side for no apparent reason.
Even before this undignified failure, mind you, there was always a tiny sense of sub-par plastic bits in the 997’s door handle. The 991 brought things back into line and then we arrive at the 992, controversially blessed with electrically deployed handles. GT department boss fella Andrew Preview makes little secret of the fact he doesn’t like these handles and wasted no time in binning them from the latest GT3 RS once he’d got sign-off to give that car bespoke carbonfibre doors. But I think he’s wrong because from a first-impression point of view they’re absolutely rock-solid. Also, weirdly, they still work perfectly well in the retracted position when the car isn’t locked, which makes you wonder why they bother having them pop out.
What’s all the more impressive about the 992 handles is that they’re triggers for an electronic latch, and various other cars have shown this can be terrible news for the reassuring feelings conferred by the exterior handle. I drove some kind of new SUV a while ago, can’t remember which, and the faux mechanical action of its electronic door handles was so off-beam that it felt like shaking hands with a dead man. No such worries for the 992, which keeps its handle game tight, possibly the tightest it’s ever been.
When the Audi R8 came along, it was the first time in ages that a sports car seemed capable of taking the fight to the 911, and yes, the sublime, free-spinning V8 helped, as did the beautifully composed chassis and open-gate gearchange, but the real reason was that it had absolutely magnificent door handles, elegantly integrated and blessed with a crisp and satisfying action. Conversely, the reason many thought the second-gen Jaguar XK wasn’t truly up to Porsche-baiting wasn’t because of its squishier chassis but rather a worrying hint of flimsiness in its door handle action. Not as bad as its brother, the X350-shape XJ saloon, which had terrible, rattly handles – ‘Ford bits,’ a Jag insider once muttered darkly when I mentioned this – but not quite world-beating nonetheless. And world-beating is what door handles need to be if you’re to truly enjoy a car. Anything else is just a damp handshake.
