Gull-wing door (German: Flügeltüren) is an automotive industry term describing car doors that are hinged at the roof rather than the side, as pioneered by the 1952 Mercedes-Benz 300SL race car (W194) and its road-legal version (W198) introduced in 1954.
Opening upwards, the doors evoke the image of a seagull's wings. In French they are portes papillon (butterfly doors). The papillon door, slightly different in its architecture from a gullwing door – which Jean Bugatti designed in 1939, fourteen years before Mercedes-Benz produced its similar, famous 300SL gullwing door – is a pre-cursor, but is often overlooked when discussing "Gull-wing" design. Conventional car doors are typically hinged at the front-facing edge of the door and the door swings outward in a horizontal plane.
Apart from the Mercedes-Benz 300SL of the mid-1950s and the experimental Mercedes-Benz C111 of the early 1970s, the best-known examples of road-cars with gull-wing doors are the Bricklin SV-1 from the 1970s and the DeLorean DMC-12 from the 1980s. Gull-wing doors have also been used in aircraft designs, such as the four-seat single-engine Socata TB series built in France.
Read more about Gull-wing Door: Practical Considerations, Design Challenges, Aircraft
Famous quotes containing the word door:
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)