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kstrauser 10 hours ago

If you're driving in a competitive, sanctioned high-speed race, sure, fine. Save every bit of drag possible. At highway speeds in a normal-person shaped vehicle, they cannot possibly make a measurable difference.

dylan604 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Wouldn't that depend on the accuracy of the tool doing the measuring?

kstrauser 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Not really. Stand in front of a car, squint, and observe the size of its silhouette. Now move slightly so that you can see the outline of the door handle, and consider its relative size compared to the rest of the car.

This isn't a perfect comparison. You could design car handles that look like little parachutes attached to something with the drag profile of a dolphin, but that's not a likely situation. In general, the area of the rest of the car is going to be many thousands of times that of the door handle. Given the difficulties in measuring, let alone modeling, turbulent air flow, it would be hard to detect a door handle's drag compared to the rest of the car.

I guess you could attach a meter to the door handle itself to detect how much drag it experiences from its own perspective, and that'd be pretty accurate. My hunch is it'd be an insignificant rounding error compared to the rest of the system.