Cardboard doors
11/15/2015
Some time ago, a colleague called them carton doors, the side doors of the compact cars of the seventies and eighties. Anyone who sits in a first-generation VW Golf or a Peugeot 205 and slams the door shut knows what is meant.
The car doors of the time were not only much thinner, leaving more interior space for passengers, but also much lighter than the safe openings that are installed in modern cars.
Today, this is for reasons of both safety and comfort. After all, modern car doors have to accommodate several electric motors (for window regulators, side mirrors, central locking), fat speakers for the music experience and at the same time massive struts for side impact protection. In addition, today's drivers are more sensitive to noise, so more insulation material and thicker windows are required. It goes without saying that a door of this weight also slams more forcefully into the lock.
The thin doors used in cars 30 or 40 years ago therefore often had to be thrown shut properly to ensure that they closed properly, and even then you weren't sure whether they were really completely closed. And if you then fitted loudspeakers in the thin interior panels, they could easily fall out if you got a bit too carried away when closing the doors ...
