Originally Posted by
livedarklions
Engineering a door handle to be difficult to find and reach doesn't raise huge safety/accessibility issues in your mind? There's a lot of reasons door handles are designed to be a) easy to open, b) easy to locate, and c) not likely to be opened unintentionally.
These are indeed concerns. Though it's worth noting that many cars can have a simple switch to entirely disable the rear interior door handles out of the latter concern.
Concerns have to be weighed in balance to each other. It may be that "dooring" loses as a concern to "crash escape" - but then we're not talking about lack of a handle as already accepted as a viable rear passenger configuration, but essentially a less "convenient" handle.
It was meant as more of a thought than an end conclusion though.
BTW, about 90 % of the parking I do is in lots or on a driveway where passing traffic from behind simply isn't an issue.
Plenty of cyclists see parking lots as through routes (with varying degrees of legitimacy), and while most parking lot spaces are perpendicular, more than a few have some parallel spots squeezed in.
Then there's the whole angle parking concern, a configuration commonly seen both in town centers and common in small-medium size lots of professional buildings and the like.