FEATURE CAR 1935 BENTLEY 4¼ JAMES YOUNG DHC
Moving away from the conventional idea of a side-hung door on hinges, opening outwards, has made for some interesting cars. There are those with gullwing doors, like the Mercedes 300SL, and the scissor idea as seen on the Lamborghini Countach. There are butterfly doors, rising over the windscreen pillars of the McLaren F1, the little Toyota Sera and more recently the BMW i8. But doors that move on an axis parallel with the side of the car, without rotating, are much more unusual. The BMW Z1 of the late 1980s and the Kaiser-Darrin of the 1950s offered doors that slid away into the bodywork, but we can find only one other car with a similar parallel-action door to this Bentley, and that was a striking machine from 1938 powered by a Hispano-Suiza engine – the Saotchik-bodied streamliner built for Xenia Dubonnet.
In the Bentley's case, the doors look entirely conventional when closed. You expect them to open like any other rear-hinged 'suicide' door typical of cars from this era, but moving the handle and pulling gently causes the door to move out and then backwards, the whole panel remaining parallel to the side of the car as it articulates on two rectangular pieces about a foot long, both hinged at one end on a supporting pillar behind the front seat and at the other end, in the door itself. It looks complicated but in concept it isn't… although getting everything to line up and operate smoothly is more of a challenge.
To modern eyes, the set-up has two advantages over a conventional rear-hinged door: in 2007.
