Looking back on rearview mirrors

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DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour    


It’s time for another chapter of “I remember…” The subject for this one is rearview mirrors. Not the ones inside your car. I’m talking about the ones outside, sometimes referred to as side mirrors.

When I was a kid, careful not to crush dinosaur eggs when I was skipping down the block, there were a lot of things that were not included on new cars and outside rearview mirror(s) happened to be one of them. I vividly recall the new cars my father would buy. Generally they were Oldsmobiles or even Lincolns.

We’d usually get one or more every year. We owned junkyards when I was young so as soon as my Dad would pick up his new car he’d drive it back to the yard and pull out a pair of brand new spiffy-looking mirrors. Most of the time they were futuristic-looking chrome jobs that were really shiny and eye-catching without being gaudy…which was not easy considering we lived in Indiana. (An empty container of Jiffy Pop popcorn was considered stylistic back then.)

He always took his time because in order to install the mirrors he had to drill holes in the car door(s). By the way, the reason I keep giving a plural option is that occasionally he would only install a mirror on the driver’s side and other times he would put one on each side.

Eventually car manufacturers began offering outside rearview mirrors as a factory-installed option or in the case of some high-end vehicles, standard equipment. It still involved opening a window to adjust the mirror by hand. The mirror on the passenger side had to be adjusted by someone sitting there and I can still hear my mother whining about having to open the window because it’s so cold outside. (Hey, Ma…try sitting in the back seat on January 23rd while we’re whizzing along at 60 mph and you have your window open to adjust the damned mirror! I had to take my little brother and hold him in front of me to shelter me from the cold wind.)

The next innovation was outside mirrors that could be adjusted manually from inside the vehicle by working a knob that protruded through the inside mechanism from the mirror. Golly, weren’t technology grand!? Only trouble was that often times the knob would either become stubborn or decide it had enough and just died. Then you can guess what happened next; that’s right, the window would come open again and the mirror was adjusted by hand. So much for technology!

The ultimate gestation of the external rearview mirror came when manufacturers began equipping their vehicles with power-adjusted units as standard equipment. Oh, Happy Day!!!! This wonderment of automotive engineering was almost 100% reliable.

Eventually outside mirror became palates of their own for things like turn signal arrows and Blind Spot Information System warnings. Heck, some of them are even heated and tinted. And there are cars like the new Jag XJ where the mirrors fold inward when you shut the car off (with the hope that they go back to a usable position when the car is started). What will they think of next?

One more reflection on the mirrors (pun intended). I remember seeing pictures of some of the post-war automobiles that were built in Japan. For some reason they always had their outside rearview mirrors way forward on the front fenders. I never knew what the significance of that was.

To have a mirror that was too far away to even adjust from the driver’s seat never made sense to me. Eventually the Japanese began to move their outside mirrors to where the Western manufacturers did. I don’t know if the change in mirror positions helped or not.

By definition the job of a rearview mirror is to show what’s behind you, but many people don’t seem to understand that or worse they don’t know how to use them.