First Honda Prologue image

Sorry to be Debbie Downer, but flush door handles are an absolute PITA in climates which receive freezing rain and snow. Doors actually freeze shut and you need something to yank on to get them open. Not all cars live in nice climate-controlled environments. I've got four of them sitting in my driveway right now, none of them live in the garage. We need to understand that automotive design must work outside Florida and California. The life of a northern EV is a difficult life indeed.

 

Good thing for the Lyriq it is a Push button door opener, they don't pop open and get stuck.

 

Bad for the Lyriq... When that door is frozen shut there will be no way to open it!

As you can tell, I'm a little fed up with car manufacturers who don't spend sufficient time and effort testing their designs in cold weather. Sure, they go to Kapuskasing for a couple of weeks to make sure the car starts when it's cold. What they don't do is drive through a full winter of the nasty cr@p we get for weather.

As a case in point, a close friend recently purchased a Mitsubishi Outlander. It's a nice vehicle and suits their family-hauling mission quite well. The folks at Mitsubishi really screwed up in the design of the vehicle's cruise control. You see, it has adaptive cruise control so it will maintain a constant distance to follow the vehicle ahead. Great. Oh, maybe not so great. Drive on a snow-covered highway and snow and slush cover the forward-facing sensors which detect the vehicle ahead. When this happens adaptive cruise control cannot function. Rather than having engineered a fall-back operational mode to allow the vehicle to go back to the old-fashioned cruise control via speed monitoring, when those sensors up front are covered in snow the vehicle has NO cruise control at all. Who is the bonehead engineer who came up with that idea???? Clearly it was an engineer who had never operated a vehicle in true Canadian winter conditions.

Unfortunately the Lyriq will likely fail miserably if it is parked outside in any real winter weather. I guess GM is counting on Cadillac buyers being so affluent that they'll constantly keep their Lyriq in a heated garage.

 

That I feel is personal opinion and incorrect.

GM does the full gambit of testing in the cold weather.

Also the doors have strong door poppers to help open them as well as a tab to grab to open the doors by the B-Pilar.

 

When is the CR-V EV/Hybrid going to be available? Guess that will compete with the RAV Prime which is already available.

 

GM is actually one of the better manufacturers when it comes to cold weather testing, BUT door poppers aren't likely going to cut it. Call this well-informed intuition. As a case in point, there were more than a few local Tesla owners who couldn't get into their cars because the power actuators on the door handles weren't strong enough to power though the ice holding the handles tightly in the door.

Thanks, I'll take the range hit that comes with having door handles I can actually grab.

If we're really concerned with lowering the Cd there are lots of other ways to do it. Start with fairing the wheel arches. Those fairings are a maintenance nightmare but they really do cut drag.

As an interesting side note, I've seen some data on Formula-E vs Formula-1 drag related to faired vs open wheel - Formula 1 is really paying a price for those open wheels, but with the entire field running open wheels according to formula rules, nobody can take an advantage by fairing their wheels.

 

you keep coming back to the door handle actuators.... GM doesn't need them as you are pushing into the door to activate a switch under the handle and a popper will push the whole door open.

 

Ummm... that's the rub. Will the popper have sufficient force to pop open a door that's coated in ice? I strongly suspect the answer to this is "no", which will leave the owner outside the car trying to figure out how to defrost their car from the outside so they can then use the popper to get the door open after the external ice has been melted.

BTW I should mention that I live in the region of Canada which receives the greatest number of hours per year of freezing rain so this is a very real concern in this geography.

 

Because you mentioned the discontinued Clarity PHEV, perhaps you were hoping for future Honda PHEV sedans or SUVs. Nope.

Honda EV sedans for North America? Nope.

Honda EV SUVs for North America? See GM.