3 days ago
The Disappearing Car Door Was a Cool Idea With Impossible Execution
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It's fascinating how today's algorithms can dredge up something from the depths of the internet and serve it up to vast swaths of people. If not for that phenomenon, this video of a clever 'disappearing car door' system built by a defunct company called Jatech would've assuredly faded away ages ago. There's precious little information on it, but if the associated YouTube comments on this video are any indication, it will continue to mystify people for generations.
The video was uploaded by an account named 'Disappearing Car Door' 18 years ago; this, unsurprisingly, is its only contribution to the platform. In the three-minute film, we see demonstrations of the system on a pair of Lincoln Mark VIIIs. The door, which has been lengthened by 10 inches to bypass the car's original B-pillar, swivels under the vehicle as its window retracts. In a later demonstration of a different implementation on a prototype passenger cell, we see a door rotate down without lowering the effective floor of the car. That would be handy, as ground clearance is probably one of the system's most obvious issues.
You'd think another would be side impact safety, but Jatech was confident that not only was its concept not a detractor to crashworthiness, but it reportedly improved it. We're definitely lacking some details here, but the company talked of a 'structural reintegration of the door with the unibody' and a bespoke custom door frame system cryptically named 'Cruciform' on its website, which is fortunately still accessible by way of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
Jatech also promoted that it worked with 'the finest and most experienced coach builders in the U.S. and Europe' to realize its breakthroughs. And yes, there was supposedly a manual override of some kind, somewhere.
It's unclear how much time exactly was spent working on this system, but it seems it had a long history. As the company told it, the Lincoln Mark VIII prototypes were supposedly built at Ford's suggestion after the automaker invited Jatech to visit its design subsidiary Ghia, in Italy. Cadillac purportedly expressed interest as well.
Neither manufacturer bit, though, and as of 2010, Jatech was still hoping to commercialize its invention. The 'designers of the exciting Disappearing Car Door technology are now in a position to equip your favorite car with our cool, sexy, safe, and convenient automatic car door,' the company's website read in a snapshot from 15 years ago. Jatech was even willing to 'design an original vehicle body' that incorporated the tech. While no such examples apparently ever existed, the site does feature sketches of generic sports cars, indicating that Jatech felt its solution was viable across a variety of body styles. This alternate example Jatech tested keeps the flip-down door within the car's body. In that way, it's more similar to the approach BMW took with the Z1, but more complicated. disappearingcardoor via YouTube
Credit to Jatech, the disappearing door did bear some advantages. The extended aperture was ideal for vehicles with rear seats but no back doors. The swiveling door also consumed almost no space when opening, meaning you could park much closer to other vehicles without risk of contact. Also, note how the side mirrors on the Mark VIII prototype are attached to the A-pillar and not the door; because of this, an exiting passenger could still use that mirror to determine when to safely leave the vehicle.
All that said, the benefits didn't seem to outweigh the drawbacks. Without more specific information or any crash test data to suggest otherwise, we're skeptical of the claimed safety advantages of the system. Complexity is an obvious problem, and if you look at the insides of the doors on the cars Jatech did convert, you'll notice that they're completely featureless—no pockets, no design, nothing. Perhaps the company didn't feel a need to waste effort mocking up custom door cards for these prototypes, or perhaps space and clearance were challenging considerations to overcome. Either way, you'd have to figure there was a reason the folks at Ford and GM didn't play along, let alone steal the idea for their own.
Still, that quaint three-minute ad has racked up over 21 million views on YouTube as of this writing, indicating that for all its faults, Jatech achieved something remarkable here. Who can guess how many impressions it'll have amassed by the time it reappears in our social feeds in another five or 10 years' time?
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