more ask lj about cars

[forgotten_aria]

Have any of you owned a car with a sliding side door? Do you have anything I should worry about if I were considering a car with one.

Comments

[crs.livejournal.com]

My parents have had vans with sliding doors for a while. They seem pretty well understood by manufacturers these days.

[nacht_musik]

They can sometimes be really hard to open or close, especially parked the wrong way on a slope, or if the mechanisms get cranky. Maybe not usually a problem for a healthy adult. I've seen powered sliding side doors, they kind of scare me, but I gather they're not ACTUALLY automatically evil.

[katybeth]

Powered sliding doors are actually pretty cool.

[cfox.livejournal.com]

My MIL has drama with her powered slide door; apparently there's a belief shared by only half the family that it's "bad for it" to manually open and close the door, and a lot of fuss made when someone forgets and grabs the handle, or the driver doesn't activate the mechanism promptly.

(AFAICT, it's a social problem, not a technological one.)

[twitch124.livejournal.com]

I _hate_ powered slide doors. They're slow, prone to breaking or refusing to close because a sensor goes weird, and I just don't trust their safeties.

Manual ones are great, though. Solid and space efficient.

[testing4l.livejournal.com]

My '91 Aerostar has one. The biggest problem is that it's become harder to close as the years have gone by. People have to slam it when they close it these days.

Of course, this is some 17 years after it was new -- some of that's expected. Especially since it survived me beating up on it in various ways while I was in college.

[brass-rat.livejournal.com]

my folks had a car with 2 (Nissan Stanza wagon). I remember them getting a little crunchy when the car got old, but for all I know vacuuming or greasing the track or something similar would have solved the problem.