"Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"

[elfs]

"Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" is the popular refrain many Linux users like to toss at people who run one of the proprietary operating systems, like Windows or MacOS.

Well, Volvo is betting that, if you're a woman, you would. Their concept car for women has the following blurb: "The no-open hood, which actually can be opened by a mechanic if necessary, is in response to the fact that drivers of new cars today, and conceptually in 10 years, don't need to look under the hood since most of the parts reliably run off electronics."

I have to admit that the ponytail crease in the headrest is an interesting point. "It's not about woman's lib: in an accident, the ponytail holder becomes a single point of contact where all the energy of an impact will be concentrated."

Comments

[creepingcrud.livejournal.com]

Looking at the article, the idea seems to be that full extension is about a foot less for the gullwing than a standard door (they say 2' vs. 3'). The downside is that you can exit a car via a standard door even if there isn't room for it to open fully, which is probably less true with a gullwing.