Doors

Podcast Episode: 0261
What types of car doors are out there?

​     Ever wondered how your car door became an essential part of both safety and style? Join us as we embark on a journey through the captivating evolution of automotive doors. From the traditional to the exotic, we unlock the stories behind each design. 

​         We may not know it, but we see them all the time and it takes one of them for us to enter or exit any vehicle. Yes, they're doors. We have them everywhere. They're in office buildings, they're in houses, they're on construction equipment and, naturally, they're on our vehicles. But they weren't always there. But what's the reasoning behind it and what types are out there? You have to think about it. There's been all kinds of different experimentation with power units for the automotive world, but what about doors? And yeah, there is. There's a ton of doors that you could see out in the world of the automobile, and we've all been exposed to a whole bunch of different types of doors. Now, most of us have only seen the standard hinge, door front hinge, that's it. But there's a multitude of many different styles of doors, and we're not just talking about going from a DeLorean or scissor cut from a Lamborghini Countach. No, there's actually a lot more than you really think, and today AutoLooks is going to take a look at all the different types of automotive doors.
 
       Welcome back to the AutoLooks podcast. I am your host, as always. The doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay, coming to you from our host website at AutoLooks.net, if you haven't been there, stop by, check it out. Read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings. Go to the Corporate Links website page. Big or small, we have them all car companies from around the globe. The AutoLooks Podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by Podbean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net.
 
        So, like I said in the intro, doors we use them to enter and exit our house. We never really think about it, but even with your house, there are many different forms of doors. Now you got to remember. You got pocket doors, you got closet doors, you got overhead doors and then you got your standard hinge door. Now, being that my first full-time job outside of college was actually for a door company, I kind of got used to seeing you know some different styles of doors and it's really funny when you really think about it, because, well, a guy that's attached so much to the automotive industry would actually have a background in just standard doors for your house. And, of course, with all of us we know doors are the most important thing to hide your car away from prying eyes, putting your car in the garage by using an overhead or a roll-up door is the best way to secure it and easy for you to get into and out of. They're great in the summertime, they're great in the wintertime. An overhead door on your garage and my first job? No, I didn't install them. I was actually the warehouse guy and I never knew there was so much into all the different types of doors, and for that I started looking at my car and wondering what other doors are out there. We all know about vertical doors, scissor cut doors, suicide doors, standard hinge and hell, the removable ones that Jeep has. But what other types are out there? Well, throughout history there's been all kinds of different types of doors, and today we're going to take a look at all the different variations of them and give you examples of them so you can actually understand what they are. 

        ​First one we're going to get into is kind of a newer one that just started coming out the bi-parting door. A bi-part door is exactly what you think. It's two separate doors. You can actually find this on dodge rams. They have the tailgate, so they either fold down or split open. They're like a bi-fold door. Now an actual bi-fold door would be connected with a hinge in the center and they fold up and out of place, kind of like the security shutters you see in malls. But a bi-part door is hinged on either side like the front of your vehicle. It's kind of like a suicide door for your tailgate. And Dodge is starting to release this because they're starting to understand not everybody wants to drop down their tailgate. After seeing the success of the Honda Ridgeline with its standard hinged tailgate, dodge thought what happens if we split that in two? We can get in and out.
 
        Now a bi-part door even on pickup trucks and automobiles has been around since pretty much the beginning of the automobile. They had them back then the tailgate wasn't always there. Tailgates kind of came in with standard steel boxes and wood boxes being added to the back of the body-on-frame cars. They created a single cab up front and either a flat deck or a boxed-in unit for the rear. Now you go to Europe and find a lot of these short back boxes. Now in North America we're used to just standard truck boxes that we see in our full-size and mid-size pickup trucks. But everywhere else in the world they had the short steel boxes that usually only ride up between 12 and 18 inches up Fully steel. You could damage them; you could replace them. They basically drop down as Holy steel. You could damage them; you could replace them. They basically dropped down, as we talked about, with the bi-part door. Next to that would be the drop-down or the tailgate.
 
        Now we all know tailgates. Oh, tailgates, pickup trucks, right? No, they're not only in pickup trucks. My first year in college, my roommate had a 96 Honda Civic hatchback. And if you didn't know this about the Honda Civic, yes, it's a hatchback but it also had a tailgate. It had this tiny little part about eight inches that would flip right down at the bottom and the rest of the hatch would come up. It's a tailgate. They basically put in there for people because they knew it's a two-seater, two-door car. People might go tailgating, they might go to car shows.
 
         The Japanese understand that people like their cars and like to show them off and with this being a hatchback, they're not just going to make the whole thing open up, they're going to put a drop down, they're going to give you a tailgate on the rear and for that it makes it easy to slide things in and out of. Vehicles like pickup trucks are the prime example of tailgate, because we all think a drop-down tailgate, pickup truck, we could slide our plywood or two by fours, motorcycle, bicycle, you know, anything just slides in super easy. Just drop it down, bam and it goes right in. Now tailgates are usually built to higher construction than standard doors because they're made to hold extra weight. Because you have to remember anything that goes roughly 12 inches past the end of your tailgate has to have a red flag on it because it's going too far out. And tailgates, when you put plywood in something like a Honda Ridgeline, a standard 4x8 sheet is going to stick out. You can't just lean it on top of the tailgate; you got to put it in and slide it over the top of that.
 
        But tailgates were also used extensively back in the day in station wagons. If you go back to see station wagons, they had a hatch top and a tailgate bottom very similar to that 96 civic my roommate had in college. But the other cool thing with the tailgates from station wagons back in the day because you remember, wagons were huge from the 50s all the way up into the 80s when the minivan came out, we've talked about this the rise and fall of the station wagon, first season of the auto looks podcast. But the cool thing with station wagons is they have something that didn't exist in sedans until Tesla came out rearward facing seats. Old school station wagons actually had rearward facing seats. Hell, some of them had full benches in the back because they knew you needed to bring a lot of kids and a lot of stuff with you when you're going to the drive-in theater. You don't need to shove all that baggage back there. No, go to the movies, your kids could sit back there. You want a better spot to go fishing? Sit back there and fish off your tailgate. But if you're sitting in the back of the vehicle, like a station wagon, it's basically something to put your feet up on. You can relax as you're waiting for the tow truck. It's kind of a cool thing. 

       From there we go to what we call the standard hinge doors. Now, everybody all knows about standard hinge doors, but we have concealed hinge doors on our vehicles and that's what you see a lot of. But there's also exposed hinges what you see a lot of. But there's also exposed hinges. Something like a Mercedes G-class or even the old school Toyota FJ cruisers had outward faced hinge doors. Hell, most commercial vans have hinge doors and they're fully exposed on the outside of them. I've seen so many pro master vans with this style of hinge on them and they do this, so they're easily to be replaced.
 
        Why did they put them on these? SUVs, like the G-Class, wasn't originally built for consumer consumption in high-end clientele. No, they were built for the military, just like the FJ Cruiser. So, they put the hinge on the outside because if you damage the door out in the field, you have to be able to change it really quick. Now with their standard automobile they're interior-mounted or frame-mounted hinges. They're inside, so they're hideaway hinges so you don't see them, which makes it more difficult when you've got to pull that door off. Now if you want to go right into it, then you get something like the exposed hinge on the removable doors. Now, Peugeot had this way back in the day on their old SUV, the P4.
 
       But the biggest one you'll understand with exterior hinge doors that are removable is yes, the first thing that comes to your mind Jeep, the Jeep wrangler, has fully exposed exterior hinges and they're made that way so you can remove the door. Now you can't exactly just go around any shopping mall and just pick up the door and just take off with it. No, they do have locking mechanisms on the inside of the vehicle to make it so that nobody could just walk by and steal your door or use that as an easy way to break into your Jeep. Trust me, they've been thinking about this for a very long time, but Jeep had them like that from all the way back in their military days, and they needed those because it made it easier to get into and out of. So, when you're out in the field you'll take those doors off, but in and around the barracks you need to stay confined, especially if you leave the base, you can't be seen in your uniform. So, they had removable doors that you could put on and take off. 

​       This is a great feature. You know, jeeps were always amazing for that because you could take them off. Like how many other vehicles in history allow you to? Just, you know, in the middle of the mall parking lot being like I don't want the doors, doors on my truck, I'm just going to take them off and drive home. Which begs the question is if I take the door off my car, can I still drive around? Because technically it's similar to a Jeep, but Jeeps are built for that in mind. They're built to be drivable without the doors on them. So essentially, a Jeep is a no-door vehicle. The Wranglers and now the Gladiators are built for you to take the doors off, which means they're built for a placement of no doors on them a full frame, which means they don't utilize the door for any structural integrity. It'll be used for crash resistance, but even still, they try and keep the lower sill plates sitting out from the door to ensure that they get hit before the door, to ensure that if you don't have those doors on, you still have some sort of safety between you and a vehicle in a side impact collision.
 
        So yeah, there's a lot of thought that goes into a fully exposed door space. Now, with those, we've also seen one of the things that the Ford Bronco brought out, which was the window doors. Now, they never really brought them out to market, but those are just kind of neat. You saw them again in the McLaren Senna. They essentially have a window in the side of the door and you got to think about to yourself why would you want a window in the door? It's weird, like really, why do you want a window? Why do you need to be able to see out? Why do you need to look at everything that's out there? Well, for the Ford Bronco, they essentially didn't have it as a view window, they just had an open space.

​       Jeep has that with the bar doors that you can add onto the vehicles. They're essentially just a two-frame door that fits right into the same placement of the standard Jeep doors. Now they look cool and a little bit more easy access. You still get some sort of safety, but with a fully exposed frame you get more, more airflow through it. So, when you're out in the bush you could see a lot better because, trust me, taking the doors off a jeep when you're out in the bush is a lot easier, because you can literally stick your whole body out of your vehicle and look down to see where the placement of your tires is, to ensure you don't fall off that cliffside. So, there is a reason for it. 
​
       The window ones that you find in in, like McLaren and Sennas, those are just weird. They basically just make it so you have a small placement where you could see the curb. Now, with a Senna being a high-end car, you really want to see the curb, because you don't want to hit the curb in your car, do you. No, nobody wants to hit the curb in their car. A lot of supercars have this problem because of how low they are and how short their windows are. You can't see out and be able to see everything with it. Like, how many people have you actually seen back a Lamborghini Countach into a garage? Most of them put the scissor, cut doors up and stick their head out because the back window is too small. Now, by the sense of having those windows in the doors, it allows you to see the curb so you can make better judgment about turning a corner. You won't damage your vehicle. You won't take out those you know $5,000 rims on your vehicle. You'll be able to see what's there. 

        ​Now let's take a little step back. Let's go back to the beginning A standard, conventional doors. Now there were originally exposed hinge doors, like in the Jeep, but now they're more of a hideaway hinge built inside the vehicle. But what's the reasoning behind why we have doors? Well, today we kind of think about it as it's got to be there, right. It's got to be there for safety. It's got to be there to ensure the safety of every single occupant in that vehicle. Plus, we got air conditioning running. We want to keep the air conditioning in the vehicle. We want to keep the heat in the vehicle because essentially, we're driving around on a climatized bubble set to our personal standards, and we have to do that.
 
       But in the original days of the automobile, like when they first started coming out and were horse-less buggies you have to remember buggies Unless it was a high-end buggy and somebody was sitting right inside of it there were no doors on them. You basically just hopped on and took off. Well, automobiles had that inception at the very beginning. Once we started building better frames, we wanted to create safety. So, we created doors on our vehicles. We wanted to protect ourselves from the elements. We realized being more enclosed meant we were able to control the climate inside of our vehicles. So as that, we added doors and eventually we added windows to those doors to try and close the exterior environment away from the interior acclimatized section of our automobile.
 
        Doors help with that. Now, an exposed hinge on a Jeep Wrangler doesn't really help with that. But if you're taking them off, there's a reason for it. You're not taking them off in the dead of winter when it's minus 40. No, if you're taking them off in that time, there's a serious problem. So conventional doors had their original appeal, but we also had what they called suicide doors. 

           Now  suicide doors aren't a big difference in door construction or anything else from a standard hideaway hinged door, no, they're essentially a conventional door, just hinged on the opposite side. Now this was a big thing all the way up until the 1970s and then they disappeared. You can find them today on Rolls-Royce products and Bentleys, but not on many other vehicles because people have shied away from the suicide doors pack and the reason for that safety. And if you ever driven a club cab truck like my Tacoma, those half doors they're kind of annoying because you have to open both doors for both passengers to get out, but then somebody has to move into the way of the front door so you can close the back door so you can both exit and get out. You can literally be trapped. So that's essentially the reason why suicide doors don't stick around. They're cool, but they're built for big luxury vehicles and huge doors that you don't have to worry about getting trapped inside of their doors that are not going to open at the same time. Your chauffeur gets out of the vehicle, closes the door, then gets you out of the vehicle. It's not the other way around you don't get out with the chauffeur, gets out of the vehicle, closes the door, then gets you out of the vehicle. It's not the other way around you don't get out with the chauffeur. 

       ​From there we move on to a cool favorite of mine, the butterfly. And yes, there are doors that are called the butterfly. Butterfly is not what you think they are. A lot of people will call these gullwing. A lot of people will call these pair of scissor cut or vertical doors, but no, they are a butterfly door. The Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren was one of the greatest inceptions of the butterfly door because it came out from your vehicle and floated upwards away. It created a massive space, kind of like butterfly wings coming out. You know the Aptera 2E, the SSC Aero 8, hell. The McLaren 650S and the ArcFox GT hell, even the CyberCab that you see has butterfly doors on it. They swing up and out of your way. Now, they're not top mounted, so it's not a standard full gullwing door, but it does crave for more ease of access getting inside your vehicle. 

       ​See, a lot of people have understood the scissor cut door that came out in Lamborghini Countach’s Scissor cut or vertical as everybody calls them is hinged to the end of the hood line and your door sits flat and just moves up. Now the problem with that is they really have to move out of the way and these are big, heavy doors that you got to move up. You never get full access to entry and exit of your vehicle. There's very few that can actually do that. Like the HTT, Plethore has vertical doors on it. The scissor cut one style. It goes to the front, but they put their hinge further up the hood line so that the door would completely leave the exit space Something like the Bugatti EB110 and the Countach, if you've ever been inside of one. Trying to get into or out of the vehicles is not easy. The scissor cut doors make it a little bit harder to get into and out. Of. That's why Lamborghini today has slowly shied away from using full scissor cut doors, moved into more of a scissor cut style butterfly. 

       ​The next one we're going to talk about is canopy doors. Now, canopy doors you don't really find in a lot of big-name vehicles. These are special doors made for usually concepts or high-end vehicles. You want a perfect example of this thing. Look at the old Maserati Birdcage the whole front moved up. Hell. Saab's last concept, the Saab Aero X. It came front. It literally moved out. It's a canopy. So, the entire center area of your vehicle the canopy that sits above you is hinged. The front of the vehicle comes up and out, sits above you, is hinged the front of the vehicle and comes up and out away from you. In the exact same context that you think. Now in 2017, one company finally built a full-scale working vehicle with a canopy top on it. The 2017 Techrules Ren from China, uses a full canopy system.
 
      Now their canopy actually goes flips, all the way to the back behind you before you can get out of the vehicle, so you have full access to everything around you, unlike the 2023 Delage D12. That canopy just moves forward slightly. It's similar to a clamshell, but it's not. Clamshells are more hoods. Canopy is for entry and exit. Now canopy is what you would think of for getting into a fighter jet, if you really want to break it down. That's a canopy style because it just goes right over top of you. Now, from that, we're going to move into the one that everyone knows. 

       ​In 1955, the Mercedes 300 SL showed us that if we wanted to get in and out of a vehicle, we didn't have to do it with standard conventional doors. We could do it with top-end doors. They wanted to make a very low-profile racing car, but they needed it to be easy to get into and out of. Well, how do you do that? You put your hinges on top and you crack part of the roof fixture. By doing that, you can make it that people have easy access into and out of the vehicle, and the 300SL was a perfect example of the original gullwing style. Next to that, there were a lot of other vehicles that you saw as concepts or production vehicles. The only other one in history you can really think of gullwing doors and understand them is, yes, back to the future the DeLorean DMC-12 with its top fixed gullwing doors.
 
       Now Mercedes did have the C111. There's also the Bricklin yeah, Canadian car, the Bricklin sv1, the Bradley GT hell, even in Japan they got into it with the Autozam. Remember that little Mazda with the special division, the Autozam AZ, going doors on a tiny little key sports car. This is the coolest thing ever. This thing, you know, has less power than a standard four-cylinder vehicle and yet it's got going doors amazing. Well, Mercedes couldn't let all these companies take all Coolest thing ever. This thing, you know, has less power than a standard four-cylinder vehicle and yet it's got gullwing doors Amazing. Well, Mercedes couldn't let all these companies take all the credit for the gullwing doors and live on with them. So, in 2010, they brought back the Mercedes SLS AMG and gave us our top-hinged gullwing doors yet again. Building the SLS off of the original second-generation Dodge Viper platform, we got a top-end Gullwing door again.
 
         Now today you can find Gullwing doors in a bunch of different vehicles. Mercedes has got them. Pagani loves to use them. Hell, the brand-new DeLorean and brand-new John Z DeLorean, DeLorean next generation are all utilizing this style of doors. They all want them again and they're all thinking to themselves why, why, why would we need them? Well, gullwing doors are amazing and cool, but from gullwing doors you can get something that's kind of between a butterfly and a gullwing door. 

      ​The 1994 Toyota Sera if you've never seen one, go to the website, take a check at the picture we have of this thing. These doors are called dihedral doors. They're essentially hinged at the front like a conventional one, but also hinged on the top. They have a breakaway spot on the top to make it easy access for you inside of the vehicle. They're essentially just a double hinged butterfly door. The Saleen S7, the Hyperion X, the McLaren 750S, hell, the Mercedes AMG One uses dihedral doors and Zenvo is going to be utilizing them for the new Aurora Tur.
 
       Now why would you get into the Dihedral? Why wouldn't you just go with a straight up butterfly door? Size and a very low profile are main reasons why some of these vehicles have these doors.  The Mercedes-Benz AMG One has a low profile so a standard gullwing door, wouldn't work on top as it adds so much extra weight to it.
 
        Adding a butterfly door. We have to find a way to make the door lighter, scissor cut. We're not going to have enough space to get out. No, but if we put a dihedral, we can hinge it on the top and hinge it on the front. We can make it fold away like a butterfly and pull away like a gullwing, which means we give better access to the interior of the vehicle. The door is far enough away and it's connected to the vehicle in a way that it will not add weight to the overall vehicle. So, the dihedral has its point. We need to remember that. You know it's got to be there. There are specific ways, and that's where a lot of these doors come into play. People think of these interesting ways they want to put their door and they want them to essentially move and be able to give you better access to your vehicle. 

       ​The next one we're going to be talking about is the disappearing door. Now, the disappearing door is kind of neat. They came in hatchback. We also saw them in pickup trucks, but one of the most successful vehicles to ever have them was the Kaiser Darin and the BMW Z1. Now the Z1, a lot of people don't really know about it. See, the Z1 sliding door slid down into the bottom of the body frame, which gave you a really shallow area to try and get into is kind of annoying. The Kaiser Darren sliding door slid into the front fender of the vehicle, which means they had to make the car wider. Now, this is kind of cool, but to create a sliding door even at that point in time, that's a lot of work you have to put into it and, being a two-door sports car, you need lots of space to get into and out of it. 

       I've seen one of these Kaiser Darrin in real life. I met a guy at the Cobble Beach Classic Car Show down in Owen Sound, Ontario, and this guy was, you know, he was driving it for his boss and he brought it up to the show. The Kaiser Darrin slid the door in the front and I watched him get in the vehicle when he had to drive it up to the showcase after the show and he was a little bit bigger than me and he had a lot of trouble trying to get in because the seats are set further back from the door. You know you open most vehicles in the back of your door. Usually, you can see either what's into the back if it's a coupe or even if it's a sports car opens up to the back of your seat. Kaiser Darrin didn't do that, so the Z1 slid down, which didn't give you enough room. You basically had to hop over this giant hump, the Kaiser Darrin, you had to squeeze through the skinny space. 

       ​Sliding doors really aren't the best thing for the automobile industry and not really great for a lot of vehicles. They're cool, trust me. It freaks people out. When you see a Kaiser Darrin, they slide their door away from you. But other sliding doors that we all know of when you hinge them in a track that's fully exposed in the exterior portion of your vehicle, it can be easier. That's when you get into larger sliding doors like the ones you see on minivans. Hell, even Citroën put one on a two-seater vehicle Sliding doors. But when you make the minivan style they slide further out of your way, which means you need a longer vehicle. That's the problem with sports cars is, sometimes you don't want an exposed track because it creates an extra area for air to get caught in and drag your fuel mileage down and bring your speed down. So, you don't want that. Well, that's the reason why Kaiser Darrin and BMW hid their doors. But a caravan you really don't care about how fast you're going in it. You don't care that that track isn't exposed on the outside of the vehicle, you just want to slide it out of the way, get a whole bunch of kids in the vehicle as quick as possible, slide it back and get moving, because really, when hockey or football practice is done, just throw the bags in, let's go, because I don't want to be there all day. I don't want to be there trying to squeeze myself through this tiny little spot on a Kaiser Darrin slide door. 

      ​The next one we're going to be talking about is a hinge door again. Now, we've heard of the standard side hinge, exposed or hidden. Well, there's also two other ones. There's a top hinge door, which we're going to get into. Isn't the exact same thing as a gullwing door and a front hinge door? Now, a top hinge door is essentially every single thing you find in any hatchback you've ever seen Wagons, SUVs they all have a top hinge. So, it's a standard top hinge fly-out door. It opens up and away. Well, there's also front hinge doors. 

        ​This was made famous by one of the most famous microcars in history and if you've watched the TV show Family Matters back in the day, you understand what car I'm going to be talking about the original BMW Isetta with its front hinge door. It literally had the steering wheel mounted on the door and the whole steering column would swing with the door out of the way for you to get in and out. Now it's really cool. But the problem with the front hinge doors unless you have a tiny little hatch window in the back you could climb through, if you get an accident in the front, you're stuck inside your vehicle. So front hinge doors weren't very good.
 
       Now, if you want to see Microlino and Artega have taken the design of the iso and BMW Isetta and transferred them into today. You can now buy them. Now Microlino you all think about, for that little scooter thing, Microlino builds a little city runabout vehicle called the Microlino Car. They all have the 1.0 and now the 2.0. This little car is essentially a rebirth of the Isetta with a front hinge, but it has a fully operational sunroof you can get through and a back window you can hop out of. You know, if you get stuck in the vehicle, front end collision. Now top hinge ones you really don't worry about, and top hinge vehicles are usually on only backs of vehicles. You don't find a top hinge on the front of the vehicle ever. If you want to talk about a top hinge door on the front of a vehicle, that's a hood of your car. But we do have them as top hinge doors on the rear of all of our vehicles. Like I said, all the CUVs, all have them. 

         ​Next, I'm going to be talking about one of my favorite ones and this one kind of falls in line with standard conventional doors is the half door. Now, half doors are all essentially just new age suicide door. If you remember the Saturn Ion back in the day they had quad doors on them. Two half doors on the back made it easy to get into and out of Club cab pickup trucks. Have them now. The last edition of the FJ Cruiser had one. Hell, Saturn's been going with these half doors ever since their SC coupes back in the day. They wanted to make it easy for you to get into the back of your coupe. That's the only point of the half doors. It's essentially just easier access into an area that wasn't easily accessible before. 

       From there we move on to one of the coolest doors. Now, if you didn't know this, Koenigsegg has their own special door and it has its own name. You've probably seen it right. You have to push out and then it goes forward. So, you're pushing it out from the vehicle. Okay, nobody really does that. So, is that like a pop-out door but then it flips forward? Is it a scissor cut door? No, they actually have a very specific name. Koenigsegg's doors that pop out and fly forward are actually called Raptor Doors. Don't ask me how they got the name, but it's really cool. And you can only find them on Koenigsegg models. It's literally owned by them. That trademark is Koenigsegg, so it's not like the Lamborghini Countach with the scissor cut doors that fly forward. You know anybody could do that. The Raptor Doors are specific to only Koenigsegg and the original Agera were the perfect example of the coolness of the raptor door.

       ​Now, from there we get into odd doors that you wouldn't even think are on vehicles, like roll-up doors. So essentially, a counter shutter door, roll-up door I deal with these all the time at work, but they do exist in the automotive world. The tesla cyber truck is a perfect example of it. It is a truck but the box of the truck is Cybertruck is a perfect example of it. It is a truck but the box of the truck is always hidden. It has a drop-down tailgate and it has a roll-up door on top to keep its aerodynamics down and make sure that it gets decent mileage for its battery capacity. They decided to cover the box, knowing that airflow would come up and over and get stuck, whirl around and drag down the economy, fuel economy or I should say distance economy for an electric vehicle. They decided to cover it with a roll-up door.
 
       Now you find roll-up doors all the time when you see commercial vans. You know the guy drops off your UPS or FedEx package. He's rolling up the door, rolling down the door. Right, he's using a slide-away door. Now, those things are pretty cool. Cool because some of them slide into the actual vehicle, some slide out, some slide on the outside, but they also have the roll-up doors on the back. Like I said, the CyberTruck is one of the few vehicles in history to actually have a full-scale working roll-up door on it.
 
       Now, like we said with the, the BMW KZ1 and the aiser Darrin, those were more of hideaway doors. They disappeared into your body. So, disappearing hideaway doors. Then we also had the standard sliding doors that we talked about. That we got into after we realized that disappearing doors are really cool but they're not very conventional. 

        ​The last big ones are one we kind of touched on the beginning but really didn't. Those would be a small variation of what you originally saw on your pickup truck. The bi-part door that Dodge now has also comes from another type of door called the wagon door. Now, wagon doors were essentially just hinged on one side. They could be big doors; they could be small doors. You still had to get power in that into it. Honda Ridgelines have them, station wagons had them. You're starting to get into a lot of different pickup trucks actually having the wagon style doors that slide out. Now third generation Toyota RAV4 actually had one of those. Instead of having a top hinge door, they had a wagon style door that came right out. Now the reason why it's called a wagon style door and that one wasn't conventional is because of its size. Wagon ones are usually big, bulky and heavy. To open an entire space where a conventional door is just made for you to get into and out of a vehicle. 

        ​Our last amazing door that we're going to talk about. You know you may think canopies, dihedrals are really cool, but there's actually one that gives the coolness factor 100% and that's one created by Aston Martin. Aston Martin doesn't have butterfly doors. Door doors don't go out as far, they don't go up. In a way they just like standard conventional doors, but they come out and up like a standard door. So, what do you call a standard door? That kind of angles itself up as it bends. That's a swan door, because it gives the appearance of a swan opening its wings. It's not perfect, right? Swan wings aren't perfectly straight, they're somewhat angled when they open their wings up. Aston Martin is one of the biggest ones with swan doors. You can find them on other vehicles like the Pagani’s Utopia and, back in the day, MaRussia B2s. So, they went up and out. 

         ​You want to get a conventional door but you want to get a little bit more extra space. So, they did that and they gave us the swan doors up and out. They're really cool but essentially when you're in a parking lot and you've got people really close to you, it's kind of like a lot of other styles of doors that you need lots of space. Like gullwing are horrible. They found that out.
 
        The reason why they put an extra hinge on the gullwing doors for a Model X to make it slightly different. It's a hinged gullwing door, not just a standard gullwing door. It's a hinged gullwing door. They put that extra and that purpose was so that when you are in a parking garage you can still open your door. Yeah, you have to think about that. It's like oh, how am I going to open my door when I'm that close to somebody and I have a gullwing door? Back in the day when you had a DeLorean, you were stuck inside your vehicle. Either that or you got to take a chance and ding their door along with yours. Now it's stainless-steel construction Not going to leave much of a dent. A dent You're going to leave a pretty good scratch and a pretty good dent on somebody else's vehicle, but not on yours. So, Tesla decided to make a hinged Gullwing door or in their case, a Falcon Door.
 
        Add something else you know there's all kinds of different variations that we can make to these doors. Like the hideaway doors are essentially just your standard pocket doors that you find in your house. Sliding doors would be like your barn doors, conventional doors well, we all get those ones, you know. Exposed hinge, that's like a gate. You know there's all kinds of different variations that we see everywhere. Doors are everywhere we open the world. And I'm going to get back into this because you know, essentially passed away just last week, as Ozzy said, when you open a door and you look on through, you can just tell somebody that you'll see them on the other side, because really that's all a door is. It's an opening for you to go from one space to another. So, in the words of Ozzy Osbourne, I'll see you on the other side. 

       So, if you like our podcast, we'd like to share a comment about it on any of the major social feeds or streaming sites that you found the AutoLooks podcast on. Click the like button, share us and follow us for more information about more of our podcasts coming out in the future. We're just starting season seven, so we got a lot more stuff to come. I'm literally looking at the list of things that we can make and get together for this year and we got tons. Trust me, we got enough episodes to keep us going for a few more years before we really got to sit down, hunker down, create some more ones. But we get millions of ideas all the time and when we get one, we get more than one in one shot. So don't worry, if you click the like button and follow us, you'll find out more. Button and follow us. You'll find out more from the AutoLooks podcast. You'll find out more from the AutoLooks.net website. You'll find out more from Ecomm Entertainment Group and Podbean.com all from just liking, following and sharing this with all your friends and family.
 
       I love hearing from all the people that have listened to our episodes or seen the pictures that we use for our episodes. It's amazing to find some people's stories out and I love it when people share their vehicles that fall in line with that podcast. Like, I'm not going to take your picture and share it with everyone in the world, but it's amazing to see it. It's like wow and finding out some of these people are within my own backyard. Hell, you want to meet up, I would love to see your vehicle and I would love to go for a ride. So, like I said, just send us a comment, send us a share, like us, follow us. And after you've done that, send this podcast out to your friends, your families, your well-wishers, your boss, your coworkers, the smelly person at the end of the hall that nobody wants to talk to Send it all to those people, okay, because you want everybody to know what type of door is on your vehicle.
 
        Do you have a specific door? Does your boss have a specific door on their specific fancy car they come to work in, or do they just use a standard conventional door like everyone else? Find that out. It's kind of cool when you really break it down, like I never knew how many different types of doors that work until I worked for an even door company and it opened my eyes to all the different styles of doors that we have out in the world for the automotive industry. And after you've done that, stop by the website.
 
       Like I said, read some of the reviews. Check out the corporate links website page. Big or small, we have them all. Car companies from around the globe all available on one direct site, the auto AutoLooks website. The AutoLooks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by Podbean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at [email protected]. So, for myself, Everett Jay, the Ecomm Entertainment Group and Podbean.com, strap yourself in for this one fun wild ride we're going to take in a jeep wrangler without a door on it. 

Everett J.
#autolooks