The more I think about it, I think this might be the biggest hurdle they’ll have to face. There’s an answer for almost everything else regarding screen reliability, camera and screen resolution, lighting, alignment, cost, etc. but this is a widespread, fundamental problem with the technology... 

I agree with you that the overall goal should be more visibility, but I wouldn’t describe mirrors as “virtually failure-proof”. I think we’re all just so familiar with working around the shortcomings of mirrors that we don’t think about all of the things they don’t do well, and we’re less apt to remember the times…

Or FCA...

It’s a public agency, paid for by us (taxpayers) seeking comment from us (taxpayers). I’d much rather this than have them blindly make decisions that affect us without getting input from real-world users.

The shutter speed issue is a legitimate concern that I hadn’t thought of, especially now that almost every new vehicle comes with LED DRLs and turn signals. I wonder, do LED headlights have the same issue? If so, every car behind you might look like an emergency vehicle with its lights “flashing”, even though they…

Yeah, considering side/wing mirrors are much more than a “piece of glass” these days. The glass often has a heating element in it for defogging, indicators for blind spot detection systems, motors for adjustment, turn signals, etc.

I find the accuracy of the guidelines to vary wildly between manufacturers. They were spot-on in my Acura, and Ford seems to mostly get it right, but in the GM and FCA vehicles I’ve seen them in they’re definitely more of a suggestion than a firm boundary.

Even a properly-adjusted mirror has blind spots.

Mirrors also require constant adjustment, even if you move your seating position just the tiniest bit, whereas a camera position would be essentially fixed in place so no matter who is driving the vehicle, or what position the seat is in, it’s always displaying the optimal view.

Can confirm, as I am both IN the parts business and have had the pleasure of selling many of them, but I’ve also had to buy one myself not all that long ago. I busted the mirror on a rented Volvo XC60 a couple of years back... wasn’t even the top-trim model but it was $500.

That could be prevented by mandating that these systems don’t share any fuses/relays/circuits with other vehicle components. The issue with the phone charger causing the SRS light to come on (educated guess here) is that they probably share a circuit based on both components requiring power when the vehicle is on, but…

If dashboards were somehow reconfigured so that the sideview/rearview camera feeds were displayed in a line below the windshield, it would put them close to the driver’s normal line of sight (possibly closer than they are now) and adjusting to it should be relatively easy, even for a driver that’s never driven a car…

I’m with you; I hope he fixes just enough stuff to make it safe to drive, cleans the interior thoroughly, then takes it out and enjoys it. Over time, fix the rust underneath so it doesn’t decay further, but don’t go overboard with a full restoration. The world already has plenty of pristine early 911s that people are…

If that is indeed their tactic and I was a UAW member working at a GM plant, earning a piddly $250/week of strike pay for a month or more while my brethren at Ford and FCA are still on the job earning full salary, I’d be pretty pissed at union leadership for leaving me and thousands of others hung out to dry to play…

The assumption from a manufacturer is that when a person’s lease is up, they turn the vehicle in and promptly pick up another new vehicle from the same dealer. That’s the hope anyway.

Not only did CfC remove a lot of otherwise viable vehicles from the existing pool of used cars at the time, new car sales themselves were down significantly for a few years afterwards which constrained the amount of vehicles that would enter the used car pool a couple of years after that, so it was kind of…

You are spot on! I’d go even further to say that hydrogen faces even more of an uphill battle than plug-in electric vehicles, because at least a significant number of EV buyers can plug in at home and slow charge overnight, so the range issue really only comes into play if they go on a trip. The electric charging…

Not to mention, these safety aids are designed to be calibrated a certain way and are programmed based on the car’s capabilities as it is when it leaves the showroom floor. Five or ten years down the road, when the sensors haven’t been calibrated in a while (or when someone has backed into it in a parking lot and…

I see the Toyota designers have moved onto much heavier doses of whatever drugs they were on when they designed the current-gen Mirai, Prius and Avalon.

Kind of looks like another overstyled airport tug.