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 Brother Neck has to go to work with a sky full of ice ballast today.
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 posted a video 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 probably can only get on (wrench)...
But don't worry about smashing the car or door handles, Tesla even helped the owners think about 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 searched.
Perhaps because of this "ice death" characteristic, the current reputation of hidden door handles can be said to be extremely one-sided.
Like the poll that Brother Neck swiped on Weibo a few days ago, it is to let people choose between mechanical and hidden doorknobs.
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 Brother Neck's 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 supplier technology and full market satisfaction.
However, not only is the reputation on the Internet one-sided, but the neck brother asked a circle of car owners and friends around him, and basically began to send telegrams in his mouth when he mentioned the hidden door handle.
High-frequency words include "defense", "anti-human", 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 rise 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, used concealed door handles to reduce wind resistance for the first time.
Combined with its low body and streamlined design, it reached a top speed of 263 km/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.
And the most common kind of hidden door handle that automatically pops up is actually Tesla's original Model S in 2012.
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.
It bounces out in different ways,
There are also those who don't play by themselves and need to press it when opening 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 effect 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.
They are then attached to a body with a drag of 0.2442 and the drag is measured one by one in a realistic environment.
As a result, the concealed design reduces the drag coefficient by 0.0001 compared to the most common pull-out design. That's a 0.12% reduction in air resistance.
0.12% !! (Roaring, Crawling Darkly)
What is the concept of this reduction, let's look at other papers.
《 Investigation of aerodynamic resistance of rotating wheels on passenger cars. Chalmers Tekniska Hogskola ( Sweden ) 》，里头研究的是轮毂造型对风阻的影响。
The author also did a variety of wheel shapes, and then analyzed their rolling resistance and hydrodynamics.
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 PAPER, "AERODYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF PERSONAL VEHICLE SIDE MIRROR", IS ABOUT THE EFFECT OF WIND RESISTANCE ON THE SHAPE OF THE REARVIEW MIRROR, AND THE AUTHOR FOUND THAT IF THE TRADITIONAL SHAPE OF THE REARVIEW MIRROR IS REMOVED, OR REPLACED WITH THE NON-BULKY DESIGN OF THE ELECTRONIC REARVIEW MIRROR, 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 handle!!
In comparison, hidden doorknobs are no different from useless!!
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.
Brother Neck will first show you the structure of the traditional mechanical handle:
Isn't it very unpretentious.
Then this is the automatic pop-up doorknob:
It really feels like I'm looking at the comparison between Nokia and 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, and at the end of last year, a 15-model S owner named John L. Urban in the United States 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 owners' forums, you will find that the door handle is not easy to use.
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, you can drag it out...
Of course, it's a trivial matter to overcome the daily bad, if you encounter an accident, because you can't open the door and delay the rescue, that's a big deal...
And with all kinds of inconveniences and hidden dangers to exchange the appearance of the hidden door handle and the 0.12% wind resistance optimization, I don't know how everyone feels, I feel like a loss anyway.
Writing this, Brother Neck felt 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 what I want to say in the last last neck is that car companies want to innovate in 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,It seems a little familiar.。。。