Hello, friends. You'd expect a supercar to open its doors like any other car, a simple swing outward on a hinge.

But plenty of them don't. The McLaren 720S lifts its doors up and forward, the Lamborghini Aventador cuts them skyward, and the Bugatti Chiron pushes them out and up at once. These aren't styling gimmicks bolted on at the end. They solve real problems, and they create a few of their own.

Why the wide body forces a rethink

The core reason is width. Supercars run wide to fit big tires and low, flat floors, and a standard door needs a huge arc to clear the body. On something like the Aventador, a normal hinge would swing a door nearly a meter and a half outward before you could slip in. Dihedral doors, the proper name for what most people call scissor doors, rotate up around a near-horizontal axis at the front. That means the door rises instead of sweeping sideways, so you can open it in a tight garage bay where a conventional door would smack the wall.

The low roofline needs the help

These cars sit low, often under 1.2 meters tall, and the roof curves down sharply toward the seats. A conventional door cut doesn't leave much headroom to duck through. Butterfly doors, the McLaren approach, hinge at the front and tilt up and outward, which pulls the whole opening up and away from the driver's head. On the 720S the door also carries part of the roof, so the aperture gets bigger the higher it lifts. You step in more or less straight down into the seat instead of folding yourself through a letterbox.

Weight and stiffness are not forgotten

A door is a structural piece. Cutting a big hole in a carbon fiber tub, which is what most of these cars use, costs stiffness, so engineers want the smallest, cleanest opening they can get. Lifting hinges let the door travel along a tighter arc, which can mean a smaller cutout in the sill and the roof. Lamborghini has said the Aventador's doors help keep the carbon monocoque rigid without adding extra reinforcement. Less metal and less bracing means less mass, and on a car chasing a low curb weight, every kilogram counts.

The tradeoffs you actually live with

Here's the part the brochures skip. Scissor doors need a lot of clear space above the car, so a low garage ceiling or a parking garage with overhead pipes can be a problem. They're also heavier to operate by hand, which is why most are power assisted. And the struts that hold them up wear out. Owners of older Lamborghini models know the drill, and replacing a gas strut on a Countach door is a regular maintenance item. Butterfly doors on a McLaren have their own quirk: the hinge geometry means you have to be careful opening them in a crosswind, since the door catches air like a sail.

What it signals to the people around you

There's a social layer too, and it's not nothing. A door that lifts draws a crowd at a car show, and that visibility is part of why brands keep using it. Ferrari stuck with conventional doors on the 488 and F8, and the brand has taken heat for it from buyers who expect drama. Lamborghini, by contrast, has made the upward door a signature since the Countach in the 1970s. The mechanism becomes a brand marker, the thing you recognize from across a parking lot before you even read the badge.

Why not every supercar does it

Not every fast car needs the trick, and some engineers actively avoid it. A well-designed conventional door on a narrower car works fine, costs less, and doesn't need a service schedule for its own struts. The Porsche 911 GT3 RS has standard doors and nobody complains, because the body isn't wide enough to force the issue. So the wild door isn't a mark of speed. It's a response to a specific package, wide body plus low roof plus a carbon tub, and it only makes sense when all three line up.

Next time you watch a supercar's doors rise, look at the gap between the car and the wall, then at the roof above it. The mechanism isn't there to impress you. It's there because the car is too wide and too low to open any other way, and the drama is just a side effect you get to enjoy.