This weather is really cold and a little unreasonable.
At this time last week, Hangzhou was still in its 20s, and it was cool and pleasant. It's only been a few days, and today I have to go to work with a sky full of ice ballast.
As soon as the temperature dropped, the annual prison experience for new energy vehicle owners in the north, especially in the northeast, officially began.
The charging rattle is slow, the battery life rattles off, and when it snows, the doorknob will freeze hard.
Yes, Bang Bang hard, like this.
Tesla also sent a ** very intimately a few days ago, teaching car owners to try to open the door directly with a mobile phone key when the door handle is frozen.
If you still can't open it, then you can probably only get on (wrench).
But there is no need to worry about smashing the car or door handles, Tesla even helps the owners figure out how to smash it and where to smash it.
Of course, it's not just Tesla, as long as the car uses hidden door handles, it will basically encounter a similar dilemma on a snowy day.
On social platforms, the complaints of car owners are also a search.
Perhaps because of this "ice death" characteristic, the current reputation of hidden door handles can be said to be extremely one-sided.
Like this poll I swiped on Weibo a few days ago, it is for people to choose between mechanical and hidden door handles.
Originally, I thought that the votes were split in half, after all, the hidden door handle is indeed better looking and more technological.
But it turned out like this:
This makes me have a very big question.
According to the understanding of car companies, especially old manufacturers, as long as it is a new function, it will definitely be verified for a few months first.
I found that the technology was mature enough for people to accept before they were willing to get into the car.
Hidden door handles, a few years ago was a rare commodity, these two years suddenly like a blowout, new cars, old car facelifts are also used, I can't wait for the old man to use it.
No matter how you look at it, it should be a good configuration with mature business technology and full market satisfaction.
However, not only is the reputation on the Internet one-sided, but I asked a circle of car owners and friends around me, and basically began to send telegrams in my mouth as soon as I mentioned the hidden door handle, and high-frequency words included "reply" and so on.
It feels like car companies have to put this configuration on the car even if they are infamy.
They ......Is there anything unspeakable that can't be hidden?
If you want to know why everyone is rushing to use it, we must first know what the hidden doorknob thing is.
Although a feature that has only become popular in recent years, concealed door handles have been around for almost 100 years.
According to the records of the time, in the 30s and 40s of the last century, there were many small refitting workshops that would help people change the doorknobs into hidden styles.
This is to make the door look more streamlined and feel like a spaceship, and the second is to hide the car keyhole and make the car thief have nowhere to start, focusing on active safety.
And it's the supercars that make the hidden door handles on the high-end countertops that are looking for top speed.
According to the formula, the magnitude of the wind resistance is proportional to the area of the impact, the drag coefficient and the square of the vehicle speed.
As soon as the speed of the car is fast, the wind resistance will rub against the **, and it will become difficult to speed up.
If you want to make the top speed higher, either make the drag coefficient low, or make the impact area smaller, such as making the body thinner and smaller, and reducing the structure of the body protruding outward.
In short, it is a little bit here and a little bit there, so that the speed can be raised so much.
That's how the hidden doorknob is cut out.
The Mercedes-Benz 300SL, unveiled at the 1954 New York Auto Show, was the first to use hidden door handles to reduce wind resistance.
Combined with its low body and streamlined design, it reached a top speed of 263km/h, making it the fastest production model at the time.
Almost all of the supercars that have set the highest speed record since then, including the Lamborghini Countach, McLaren F1 and Koenigsegg Agera RS, have adopted a similar design.
The most common hidden door handle that pops up automatically was first created by Tesla in 2012 on its original Model S.
As long as the owner approaches with the key, it will automatically pop open from the hidden state and automatically retract after locking the car, which was somewhat sci-fi more than ten years ago.
And when Tesla sold out around the world, the hidden door handle became popular by the way, and many different designs appeared.
There are different ways to play it, and there are also those that don't play by themselves, and you need to press it when you open the door.
There is also this kind of first time with absolutely no knowledge of how to open, the main one is a hundred flowers blooming, and it is also strange.
In addition to looking good, at the technical level, car companies are actually very consistent with the reason why new energy vehicles need hidden door handles, that is, to reduce wind resistance.
At first glance, this is quite reasonable.
After all, supercars can be reduced, and trams can definitely be reduced, right?
But what everyone may not know is that the reduction can indeed be reduced, but the degree of reduction is too small.
As early as 2014, a paper titled "Re-designing Door Handles to Reduce Aerodynamic Drag in Road Vehicles" was published at the then Applied Aerodynamics Conference, which studied the influence of different door handle shapes on the drag coefficient.
The author first looked for several common door handle forms on the market at that time, and the second of them was a hidden design that was flush with the body door panel.
Each handle was then digitally modeled in the simulation software Ansys based on its characteristics.
Then put them to a drag of 0On the body of the 2442, the wind resistance of the realistic environment is measured one by one.
As a result, the hidden design can be reduced by 00001, which is a reduction of 012% air resistance.
0.12% ！Roaring, crawling darkly).
What is the concept of this decline, let's take a look at other **.
investigation of aerodynamic resistance of rotating wheels on passenger cars.The Chalmers Tekniska Hogskola (Sweden) study the effect of wheel shape on wind resistance.
The author also did n kinds of wheel shapes, and then did a rolling resistance and hydrodynamic analysis for them.
As you can see from the chart on the right, using a larger hubcap can reduce the air resistance of a car by up to 6%.
Another ** "Aerodynamic Analysis of Personal Vehicle Side Mirror" is written about the influence of wind resistance in the shape of the rearview mirror, the author found that if the traditional shape of the rearview mirror is removed, or replaced with the electronic rearview mirror that has no volume, the wind resistance can be reduced by about 5%.
In other words, if you cover the entire fairing of the wheels or change the design of the rearview mirror, the effect of reducing wind resistance can be dozens of times that of the hidden door handles
In contrast, hidden doorknobs are no different from useless at all!
However, no matter how small the effect is, if there are no shortcomings, it is better than nothing.
But the problem is that the hidden doorknob is not good at all !
I won't mention the winter ice mentioned at the beginning, after all, if you have to say it, it is not impossible to overcome it.
But what's worse is that the hidden doorknob is still very easy to break.
There's a classic saying in engineering that says, "Don't add entity if you don't have to." This means that from the point of view of reliability, the simpler the structure, the better.
The more complex something is, the easier it is to break.
Let's first show you the structure of the traditional mechanical handle:
Isn't it very unpretentious?
Then this is the automatic pop-up doorknob:
I really feel like I'm looking at the Nokia compared to the iPhone.
More complex structures bring two obvious problems, one is easy to break, and the other is unsafe.
Take the original Tesla Model S, which was the first to use pop-up door handles, at the end of last year, a man named John L. in the United StatesOwners of 15 of Urban's Model S filed a lawsuit against Tesla.
He said that one of his doorknobs could not pop out because the motor was broken, and it took 300 dollars to repair. It turned out that not long after it was repaired, the other one broke down again, and it cost another 300 dollars.
He felt that the design must be flawed, but Tesla did not inform himself in advance and had to pay for it!
And if you go to the overseas Model S owner forums, you will find that the door handle is actually quite common.
There are even car owners who have come up with a temporary solution, that is, to glue a circle of transparent glue in advance, and when the handle is broken, it can be pulled out.
Of course, it is still a trivial matter to overcome the daily bad overcoming, and if you encounter an accident, it will be a big deal if you delay the rescue because you can't open the door.
And with all kinds of inconveniences, hidden dangers to exchange the appearance of the hidden doorknob and that 012% Wind resistance optimization, I don't know how everyone feels, I feel like a loss anyway.
Writing this, I feel even more curious.
Since there are so many shortcomings that can be seen, and everyone still doesn't like it, why do manufacturers still have to use hidden door handles on new cars?
So, I took this question and asked a few exterior designers from major factories, hoping that they would bring me some enlightening conclusions and point out the devilish details that I didn't take into account.
As a result, the answer they gave me was just three words: follow the crowd.
Because everyone else has it, the car you use looks like it's full of technology, and if you don't have it, it's old-fashioned, so you can't do without it.
I asked if there was no other reason, and they said no.
I really want to go over the network cable and give them a big fight.
So in the end, I want to say that car companies want to innovate in terms of shape and function, and we understand. Most people are probably like me and don't aversion to using these configurations as one of the selling points of the product.
But these configurations must not be at the expense of user convenience or even security.
It is hoped that in the future, when car companies launch new products, they can more carefully verify the reliability of new configurations and new technologies, and take into account all potential hidden dangers and dangers as much as possible, so as to strangle them in the cradle.
For example, the hidden door handle can be simply made into an option, and consumers can decide whether to use it or not.
If you really have to use it, you might as well refer to the wisdom of your predecessors?
There is both a hidden appearance, and a mechanical reliability, perfection, perfection.
But one thing to say, this semi-hidden design seems a little familiar.