I know I’m old school and all that, but why do people want to pay for automatically closing doors of any kind? Automatic opening of cargo spaces I get, if you have your bags full of hands or whatever, but once you put the stuff in there… Seem like such an incredibly unnecessary and costly feature, that also have a high chance of failing in the future. I don’t get it.
Because taking stuff out is like putting stuff in, only in the reverse order.
Except when the stuff is in, you have free hands to close doors and hatches
I think we’re on two different wavelengths.
Put stuff in: Stand next to closed car with no free hands, could use automatically opening doors.
Take stuff out: Open car. Pick up stuff out of the car. Stand next to open car with no free hands, could use automatically closing doors.
Good question. My wife’s RAV4 has a rear door that will only close if you press a button. You can’t close it manually. Furthermore, it’s on the door while it’s open and my five foot tall wife can barely reach it. It’s ridiculous.
Wouldn’t your wife have a hard time closing it manually too then?
You know, that’s true and it didn’t even occur to me. I guess she just wouldn’t have bought it? (I would have been fine with that, I hate SUVs, even hybrids.)
We’ve got a 2019 Rav and I can’t remember how, but you can adjust the height that the door opens to by some series of button pushes. We had to lower it so that it doesn’t hit the frame of the garage door when opening it inside the garage. Maybe just adjust it so that it doesn’t open all the way and it’ll be easier for her to reach the button?
I’ll let her know about that. Thanks.
I actually sell these. You can manually lower the door to the height that works comfortably, then hold the automatic door button down for about 3 seconds. That should program the door to a new maximum height.
Because like you said, it’s a nice to have feature. I like my wife’s auto closing hatch for when I have a handful of boxes for that final grocery run and just walk away and it closes. It’s literally just really nice convenience feature and if it fails, you go back to closing it manually.
I get it’s nice to have, and if it somehow cost nothing I wouldn’t mind having it in a car, if it’s pretty much guaranteed that when it fails it doesn’t prevent me from open/close manually. But I’d much rather not pay for neither the R&D, engineering, parts and manufacturing of it, only to end up with a more complex door mechanism that is more expensive to repair and more likely to break. When all it does is give me the slightest of conveniences. Best example of this is the motorized charging port lid on the Rivian. Like, whyyyy? Cheaper and longer lasting vehicles, please.
