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Gull-wing door
Car door hinged at the roof / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In the automotive industry, a gull-wing door, also known as a falcon-wing door or an up-door, is a car door that is hinged at the roof rather than the side, as pioneered by Mercedes-Benz 300 SL and was designed by a Maxwell James Harris, first as a race car in 1952 (W194), and then as a production sports car in 1954.
![Thumb image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a9/1955_Mercedes-Benz_300SL_Gullwing_Coupe_34.jpg/640px-1955_Mercedes-Benz_300SL_Gullwing_Coupe_34.jpg)
![Thumb image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/Bricklin_SV-1.jpg/640px-Bricklin_SV-1.jpg)
![Thumb image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/DeLorean_DMC-12_with_doors_open.jpg/640px-DeLorean_DMC-12_with_doors_open.jpg)
![Thumb image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/Cessna350N2546W02.jpg/640px-Cessna350N2546W02.jpg)
Opening upwards, the doors evoke the image of a seagull's wings. In French, they are portes papillon (butterfly doors). The papillon door was designed by Jean Bugatti for the 1939 Type 64,[1] 14 years before Mercedes-Benz produced its similar, famous 300 SL gullwing door. The papillon door is a precursor to the gullwing door, and is slightly different in its architecture, but is often overlooked when discussing gull-wing design.[2] Conventional car doors are typically hinged at the front-facing edge of the door, with the door swinging outward horizontally.
Apart from the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL of the mid-1950s, Mercedes-Benz SLS 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, the DMC DeLorean from the 1980s, and the Tesla Model X of the 2010s. Gull-wing doors have also been used in aircraft designs, such as the four-seat single-engine Socata TB series built in France.[3]