October 24: Cars and seagulls

What better way to start a car blog than with a pic of a seagull. Right away, you are all thinking about how those wretched birds have caused you undue stress on your newly cleaned car. Tough luck, baby, that's life. And by the way, I like seagulls, since growing up by the bay on the east coast, they were "sea"gulls, not "dump"gulls. Flying around the shore and walking on the beach. And check out those gull wings, which finally brings us to the topic of today's blog, gullwing doors and who is to blame(?) for them?

No doubt about it, Mercedes-Benz is the culprit with this unique feature, first finding a home on the classic 300SL..........

Hey, let's get this straight right now, I have nothing against this type of door, it's the offspring, the scissor door, that is stupid in the extreme. Ever try to get in and out of a car with those type of doors? Well, I have and it's not pretty. Anyway, back to the bird named doors.

Let's take a stroll thru car history and see who else has picked up on this unique, but infrequently used feature. Of course, Mercedes has adopted it for another recent sportscar, the now gone, but fondly (in mind mind) remembered SLS......

......and shown here appropriately enough in a seaside setting, but where are those pesky gulls? These cars still make a statement, when you come across one of these rumbling beasts. So that's it for Mercedes, invent this feature and then dole it out once more in sixty years.

How do you spell debacle? B-r-i-c-k-l-i-n.........

This car was manufactured in my old hometown by the bay, Saint John, New Brunswick. Government money spent like bay water (gee, what a surprise) and a problematic car, specifically those gullwings, spelt the end of this supposed safety car. Expensive to produce and hard to open, maybe the Bricklin would still be with us, if it had had a normal opening door (don't count on it).

Who else has stepped up to the plate with this unusual feature? Of course, Pagani Zonda.......

Look, if you had paid over a million large for your new ride, no matter how strange looking it is, you'd want some sort of unusual door, so the gullwing fits right in. No more parking lot accidents, when your new ride's doors raise up instead of out. But for this money, your Pagani should hover over the parking spot avoiding all contact with those non extraterrestrials.

To coin an off repeated allegation, we now come to a car produced by the Snowman. A name given to John DeLorean, due to his connection with selling cocaine in order to raise money for his poorly received car......

Made in a manufacturing backwater, like the Bricklin (Northern Ireland in this case), the DeLorean DMC-12 gained the most fame, not for its gullwing doors, but for its role in those Back to the Future movies. Question of the day.......how do you get coloured plastic to match a stainless steel body? Answer, you don't, hence the darker front and rear end caps on this short lived underpowered car.

Moving right along, we come to our favorite car manufacturer to love and to hate, Tesla.......

You can rest assured that Elon Musk thought of many ways to make his "miracle" suv different. All the other gullwings have been sportscars, but along comes Tesla with a four door and uniquely just adds this feature to the back doors. That Elon......what a guy! Of course, not to be too different, the Tesla X also has had issues with this unusual feature.

Quite a rogues gallery of cars with the seemingly sought after bird winged doors. My favorite? We never saw this car over here and actually, not too many people saw it anywhere, but it was produced back in 1990 and by that unlikely trend setter, Toyota. Remember the Sera?

 Of course you don't and nobody else does either. This little home market only unique-ster was plunked on the decidedly non exciting Tercel platform, so apart from those interesting doors, the buyer got nothing to write home about (remember this was before emails). Gosh, not even the upmarket Corolla platform for its buyers to brag about. But it had those gullwing doors.

So, if you were a seagull would you be flattered or pissed off that some German designer way back when created this feature and named it after you and your buddies? You just don't care, do you? But the service departments of dealerships everywhere appreciated this feature for the work that it created. Long live uniqueness.

Until next time.......