What's up with shaved door handles?

[Anderson]

Poking around on some Eldorados for sale in the recent past, I've come across a few Eldorados with "shaved door handles" as custom modifications.  I have two questions:
(1) What's up with those?
(2) Given that closing the door pops the locks, how does one either lock (if the poppers are enabled) or unlock (if disabled) the car?

[The Tassie Devil(le)]

It is a customising "thing" and in most cases, there is a hidden manual override to open the doors/trunk lid.

These days with Wifi some people would leave these out, and simply hope for the best.

Me, I think it is a waste of time, and in some cases, it is a wonder that the authorities haven't clamped down on the practice, as it could be regarded as a safety issue in not having door handles.

But, these days with automatic locking following a slow speed, to counter car-jacking, it would be hard to open a door that was locked from the inside.

Shaving door handles went with Frenching headlights, sunken aerials, removing drip rails, and to me, the final straw in the looks department is the painted bumpers, as in de-chroming.

Bruce.

[TJ Hopland]

I have seen installation videos where at least some of the people have a terminal somewhere on the car that can be used to send external power into the car to at least get things like the doors and access to the main battery. 

[MaR]

I though that fad died out in the '90s....

[Anderson]

I though that fad died out in the '90s....

Given that these are all circa 1970 Eldorados, it is entirely possible that it did...it's just that a few (including, I believe, one linked from here) have showed up as of late.

(Interestingly, one of the ones that showed up ended up going for substantially below-market despite having a verifiable celebrity connection and being in immaculate condition.)