Incredibly, The First Car To Come From The Factory With Pistol-Shaped Door Handles Isn’t American

I very much believe that everyone is free to be into whatever sick, depraved automotive fetishes that they’d like. I know I sure as hell am, and it’s always been the policy of the Autopian that all strains of automotive fascination are welcome here. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t have opinions about whatever it is that is your pet interest in cars, so hopefully you’re willing to listen to some good-natured ribbing, but always with the understanding you’re welcome here. So with that in mind, I’d like to tell you that I think the pseudo-military, cartoonishly-tough trend of some SUVs is one automotive sub-genre that I think is really, really silly. And I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better example of this than in the Dongfeng M-Hero 917, which features door handles made to look like guns.

Yes, guns. And not just some generic, gun-like door handle, but very clearly a gun, and a specific gun. Now, the car has been out a bit over  a year and I’m by no means the first person to note the gun stuck there in the door. The gun appears to be modeled after a Colt M1911, and I don’t know shit about guns, but that one is a pretty famous gun, and has been built for well over a century, so even a gun-idiot like me found it a bit familiar.

Here, let’s look at this interior door-handle gun more carefully on this gruff Chinese electric SUV:

That still up there is from this video of a walk-around of the Dongfeng M-Hero 917:

But, back to the door handle: that’s um, a gun. A Colt, even. And, if that’s not enough, for some reason that gun has an English inscription – and, again, remember, this is a Chinese-market car – that says “NEVER BACK DOWN.”

Those three words kind of encapsulate the whole absurdity of cars like these: never back down from what? Who is asking you to back down from something? Where are you driving? Who are the people who want cars like these, and why do they always seem to be spoiling for a fight for no reason? There’s other companies like this – Rezvani comes to mind – where the target customer seems to be someone who likes to imagine their lives are always in danger from groups of ninjas or commandos or some shit, seconds away from having soldiers dropping down on their roof from a helicopter.

It all just feels sort of silly. Sure, the Dongfeng M-Hero 917 is an impressive machine; it’s an electric car (with an optional range-extending combustion 1.5-liter motor) that, in four-motor versions makes an absurd 1073 horsepower and 1033 lb-ft of torque, good enough to move all 7,200-or-so pounds of this machine to 62 mph from a dead stop in 4.2 seconds. Damn.

The thing also has a 143 kWh battery what should give it a range of about 313 miles, according to the Chinese CLTC cycle.

Anyway, back to the main point of all this, the fact that a deliberate choice was made to make the door handles look like guns in this thing, making me wonder if their interior design team is populated with 11-year old boys. I mean, it’s not boring, at least, so there’s that?

This also got me wondering about any other cars that had guns for door handles, and it turns out there is one other car, one that takes the guns-as-handles thing to its absolute Platonic idea. That car is a 1963 Pontiac Bonnevile “Nudie Mobile.”

It’s called the Nudie Mobile not because there’s a big stack of Swanks and Ouis and Penthouses on the rear floorboards, but rather because it was the car of Nuta Kotlyarenko, who was later known as Nudie Cohn, the cowboy tailor that came up with the whole “rhinestone cowboy” over-the-top look favored by Roy Rogers and John Wayne and Elvis and Elton John and so many more.

Nudie loved custom cars, especially custom Bonnevilles, and he especially loved all of the trappings of Westerns and cowboyhood and kitchy Western everything, and that includes the liberal uses of guns for pretty much every freaking handle on the car:

Look at that! If you’re going to do something as ridiculous as making a handle on your car look like a gun, this is how you do it! You fucking commit, and that means not only are you opening the doors – from the inside and outside – with actual guns, you’re also shifting gears with a goddamn revolver and opening the glove box with another gun and I bet you change the radio stations by shooting at it, probably.

Sure, Dongfeng may have been the first production car to deliberately have a gun-shaped handle, but that doesn’t mean they did it right. I think America still wins this one.

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