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 haveĀ opinionsĀ 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 overĀ a yearĀ 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 ā and, again, remember, this is a Chinese-market car ā that says “NEVER BACK DOWN.”
Those three words kind of encapsulate the whole absurdity of cars like these: never back down fromĀ 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 ā Rezvani comes to mind ā 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 ofĀ SwanksĀ and OuisĀ andĀ 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,Ā this is how you do it! You fucking commit, and that means not only are you opening the doors ā from the inside and outside ā 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 itĀ right. I think America still wins this one.
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TIL that apparently Dongfeng is Chinese for Dartz.
***gets pulled over***
Cop: Sir, please step out of the vehicle
***opens door***
Cop: He’s got a gun!
I know you joke, but that would only be an issue in the US and Canada.
I had a huge culture shock in Taiwan when I was on a road trip with a friend. On our way back, he got pulled over for speeding. It was nothing unusual, until he randomly decided to get out of the car and approach the officer from behind while he was writing the ticket.
As a Canadian, I almost had a heart attack, fully expecting my buddy to be tackled and detained. But to my shock, the officer was completely unfazed, and they just had a normal conversation. I was totally blown away by the whole exchange.
Huh, I really thought it was gonna be from the UAE
Those door handles are just an extension of your Dongfeng
That Dongfeng is the Chinese equivalent to the eHummer.
On the eHummer the dong is in the drivers seat.
How do you warn your date about your micropenis without using the word “micropenis”?
I usually say it in German.
sehr kleine Junke?
Sorry, y’all, the data is in. And it does not support your claim.
https://www.newsweek.com/gun-ownership-penis-size-men-health-study-texas-1911738#:~:text=A%20study%2C%20carried%20out%20by,gun%20ownership%20may%20be%20inaccurate.
Imagine getting pulled over in that Bonneville in 2024. When the officer walks over to the vehicle and he sees you do something as little as sneezing, he’ll be fixing to mag dump on your ass.
Not in Texas he wouldn’t!
Itās probably more acceptable to put a fake pistol in the door in a country where people donāt actually have a pistol in the door.
In America we enjoy the freedom to be constantly worried that the drivers around us are packing a gun.
I would be more worried about getting pulled over and the cop seeing your faux gun handles thinking it is a really gun which means fun times right?
Yeah, if a walnut dropping on the car can scare a police officer into shooting into the vehicle Iād say a giant pistol on the passenger door would be even worse.
That video was nuts cop doing a roll like he was in a movie that just unloading into the car and I am really surprised and happy the person in the car was unharmed.
What killed me was the sergeant.
She heardd “shots fired” and turned her brain off A) without getting the people out of the line of fire, then B) charging into the open without any idea where the “shots fired” were coming from, and then C) joined Reno 911 in blasting away without effect with her pimped-out handgun, thankfully missing or stopping in the car before hitting the guy or a bystander.
America: where civilians are not even the *first* untrained idiots with guns you have to worry about.
Also, I am unfamiliar with this video.
this should be it: FULL BODYCAM: “Acorn Cop” A Florida cop gets into a shootout with an acorn – YouTube
if not, look up okaloosa county sheriff, acorn shooting
*Gun pointed at you*
“I want you to open the door right now and whatever you do don’t touch those guns!”
“umm officer, you see the thing is…”
It also helps that chinese street cops don’t routinely carry a gun such that they’re not incentivized to pop someone and fill out the paperwork later.
Hell, even in the little-c conservative Czech Republic the cops don’t have as many problems with shooting unarmed citizens despite a 75% urban population and shall-issue licensing for firearms.
In FL we assume they are, the worry is whether or not they’ll use it because you’re not going as fast as they want to through the school zone.
I get more of a Glock vibe out of the slide, but the handle definitely has a hint of 1911 to it.
Either way, it’s not really something I’d want in a vehicle.
I had a Sport Trac for a while that had door handles styled in geometric shapes that were clearly more style than function. They felt awkward in the hand and forced arm movements (more specifically wrist motions) that weren’t natural. I’m thinking these would do some of the same.
They’d be cool for the first two weeks.
Does the gear selector have āSOMETIMES BACK DOWNā stamped on it?
NEVER BACK DOWN
SOMETIMES BACK UP
ALWAYS BACKSIDE
Putting NEVER BACK DOWN on the slide/door handle is a nice touch, but they need to find a place for SPEAK ENGLISH OR GET THE F**K OUT before bringing this to the US market.
He’s a DONG-FENG-HERO
Got guns in his sides
It’s honestly on a whole new level of cringe and Ford is probably kicking themselves for not doing this to the F series. All it needs is some of those chrome flag badges for the lower doors and a “We the People” decal for the back window and it would fit right in. Call it the “Liberty Edition”. Sure, it’s Chinese, but if you threw in one of those PFG vented fishing shirts and a $25 gift certificate to Applebee’s, I bet a lot of people would get over it.
I think Dodge would do this before Ford.
At the rate Dodge releases and updates it’s products, I don’t think Dodge is doing anything before anyone else.
Whats wrong with PFG fishing shirts? They are very comfortable, don’t knock it till you have tried it.
Make it Cracker Barrell instead of Applebee’s and it just might work.
I actually spotted this downtown in Oslo some days ago and there’s so many layers to unpack. The Norwegian prime minister just visited China and had meeting with Xi Jinping while at the same time national security experts are red-flagging China and its relation to Russia and all the imported Chinese ev’s with potential embedded spyware that are filling up our roads.Then this weaponized 3-tonnes+ ev with pistol-shaped door handles show up .. and is scheduled to go on sale this fall.
For people who like guns and who like the 1911 this is definitely Cursed Gun Images territory.
Technically there is nothing stopping them from making the door handle a repro of a 1911 grip frame, making the grip safety the latch, and making the thumb safety the lock/unlock switch.
However they don’t have experience with firearms short of whatever craptastic thing their military gives them if they happen to be in the military (I rarely call any firearms craptastic but the Chinese military has extremely shit guns, like short barrel rifles that keyhole inside of 50 yards FFS)
And the passenger door would be a lefty 1911. A unicorn. They exist but it looks even more wrong than the driverās door.
Since I chose this as the special interest, it would be amusing if the way too far back slide catch was a functional switch.
If Nudie was going to do that in ’63 he should’ve started with a Dodge 880. It was the superior car technically with its’ unibody, Torqueflite auto and torsion-body suspension but ugly, a post-Exner plucked chicken of a stopgap style.
The whole point of the ’63 Pontiac was its’ crisp, clean look that half of Detroit would copy within a few years..
” making me wonder if their interior design team is populated with 11-year old boys”
I’ve come to believe the entire industry has been taken over by them!
I guess you have those clouds begging for a yellin too!
If they had an ounce of class, they’d hide it in the umbrella that pops out of the door end.
This is one way to make the NRA set love Chinese cars…
“NEVER BACK DOWN”
Good grief, basically the same mentality as expressed by that old saying “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Lol, those gun-bedazzled custom cars of Nudie Cohn’s are reminiscent of that episode of The Simpsons where Homer acquires a gun and uses it for everything ranging from opening bottles of Duff Beer to changing the channel on the TV.
“REVERSE IS BROKEN”
The CitroeĢn CX would like a word about that “first” thing.
My dad had a CX when I was a kid. He had to put the child locks on the doors because I continually pulled the trigger to shoot other cars.
Reaching for your door handle in that thing could get you killed in a traffic stop here.
There is some precedent: in the 1960s, one could purchase a Mopar with a pistol-grip manual shifter, like this one:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/IUsAAOSwvbRlFDn7/s-l1200.jpg
i was about to say, that i remember seeing ads for pistol grip shifters in car magazines about 20 years ago when i started getting into cars
I owned a couple of those. Not a really good shifter imo. I changed mine out for an aftermarket hurst as quick as I could. They did look cool.
It’s too bad they didn’t go all the way and incorporate a gun trigger to control some mechanism like lock/unlocking the doors.
The Colt SAA shifter and door handles are perfectly on brand for the automotive version of a Nudie Suit but Nudie’s should be pearl handled, George Patton’s opinion notwithstanding.
The Chinese car with 1911 slide door handles is very odd considering how inaccessible guns are in China. It’s not like Oregon where I can buy a Colt M1911 as soon as the background check clears.