Exactly what I was thinking, they have no experience and don’t even think before opening wide the door.
In the Netherlands, where the bicyclist is actually accorded some respect, it’s been a something of a ‘tradition’ since the 1970s to open your car door with the inside hand because this forces you to turn your shoulders. And if your head turns along with your shoulders, you’ll naturally look over your outside shoulder, in which case you stand more of a chance of seeing an approaching bicyclist. It’s known and “the Dutch reach.”
But it’ll never catch on here because American cagers would sooner kill you than show cyclists an ounce of respect.
I started riding motorcycles several years before I took up cycling. In fact I only started cycling in the first place to help rehab a leg that had been broken by a cager who decided his car needed to be where my motorcycle was. And I found that I loved cycling — road and mountain — like no form of exercise I’d ever done before. I learned to love the hurt.
Anyway, when I first started motorcycling I sometimes rode with an old timer who had been a fighter pilot in WWII and Korea. One of the first lessons he taught me wasn’t about motorcycling, it was about driving my car. He kept hammering at me to always check over my shoulder, not once but twice, before turning left or making a lane change. He said he was taught to do this in flight training as a survival measure because the German fighter pilots were fond of diving at their prey from high and behind, so you had to “check your six” (as in the 6 o’clock position) every few seconds. They called it doing “the Messerschmidt twitch.”
That was decades ago and I still never drive my car that I don’t find myself reflexively doing “the Messerschmidt twitch” before any lane change or a left-hand turn.