Evora driver door won't open - bit urgent

[hamza]

Hi

So I'm supposed to be leaving in the morning to drive to Geneva... and I can't get the driver door of the Evora to open.

I press the unlock button on the key and the lock button pops up (press it again and the passenger side pops up too) but pulling the outside door handle does nothing and feels stiff at about the point it should open the door.

Trying to open it from the inside is much the same, pulling the inside door handle doesn't seem to do much at all.

I have tried unlocking and locking the car again several times but no luck.

When I lock the car though, I can see the unlock doors button inside the car all lit up. Pretty sure it has never done that before.

What gives? Any ideas? Can this be sorted in time to leave tomorrow morning??

[agentdr8]

Chances are the latch is malfunctioning, much like mine did a while back. Lotus did not foresee ever needing to take the door card off while the door is closed, and as such, it's near-impossible to get to the latch if the door won't open (unless you want to cut a hole in the door card itself). 

There is a way to get the door open though, and it requires removing the latch catch loop (called the door striker) that's mounted to the door frame. I wrote up a how-to when I ran into this issue. You'll want to have a new latch handy, but last I heard, the S1 latches still aren't available from Lotus, and there's no way to adapt the newer Inteva latches on the older S1 doors. 

[scotty435]

Agree with Dave the same happened to my S1 but luckily did get the door open with lots of pulling on the door handle. I would suggest you try the same. Better than cutting hole in the door card.

[TdM]

My cable broke and had the same result as above. Yanking the door handle a lot worked eventually. Fairly cheap fix once door was open.

 

The lock door light stays on for quite a while after you lock the car. You don't notice until you think something is wrong, but that's normal behaviour.

[Phaeton91]

Maybe a 2 person job.  One on the inside pushing and the other on the outside pulling.  Puts less pressure on the door handle than trying to yank it open from just the outside.

[hamza]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Luckily turned out to be a simpler problem with the lock button not rising fully rather than the door lock.

A bit of encouragement when pressing the unlock button from the outside of the car (with the window down) seemed to do the trick in getting it to rise enough to unlock that car and then the handles worked just fine.

[Bibs]

Result! Some dry silicone lube may be advised around the button to stop this happening again. 

 

 

[hamza]

thanks for the tip.

Will have to wait till I get home in a couple of weeks but I will do at least that if not take the door card off and check it over / lube the internals too.