And I'm afraid if people want the Tesla doors and boot to thud they're probably going to have to put up with a much heavier car with consequently poorer efficiency ... like most of the other quality EVs that are coming out.
Not quite true, I’ve had cars with aluminium panels full of holes that closed with a reassuring thunk, and I’ve had cars whose doors seemed to be hewn from granite and closed with all the mechanical sophistication of a garden gate. Doors that thud with reassuring quality do not need to be heavy, they just need to be well designed and fitted with care. That said, I once had a Triumph Dolomite with doors that felt and sounded amazing, but since it was in every other regard an unremitting pile of steaming strike built crap that would break down or fall apart on an almost daily basis, I don’t think we can put the ‘solid’ feeling of its doors down to either mass or quality. Perhaps it was just down to sheer luck.
The whole ‘makes a nice noise when the door shuts’ thing is as much an invention of sales and marketing as the trend of venting the smell of freshly baked bread into a supermarket. It’s all about first impressions. A door that clangs a bit is not automatically less safe or utilising less impressive materials.
Marketing types realised years ago that the first noise, and therefore the first impression, of a new car that people get is never the whir of the starter or the throb of the exhaust, as the car is invariably in the quiet and echoing confines of a showroom where running the engine is not permitted. No, the very first noise is the opening door. ‘Make a good first impression‘ they say, and the old hands now fit their ever lighter door structures with acoustic baffles, tuned mass dampers, and all manner of other acoustic engineering solutions aimed not at making the door stronger, or lighter, or safer, or less prone to wind noise, but at making it sound nice when you open and close it. Likewise they design door handle mechs that weigh mere grams that are made to feel weighty, solid, and well damped, not because they need to, but because it feels nice. It’s a sales pitch, a ruse. You’ve been sold on one tiny but carefully engineered aspect that has absolutely nothing to do with how well built the rest of the car is, or indeed how good the doors are at being doors.
They’re right of course, nicely weighted doors and touch points like volume knobs and heater controls do feel good, and go a long way to helping to justify the massive layout of cash.