Seeing Where You've Been

There's an article in the summer issue of Mazda's "Zoom Zoom" magazine that describes some of the ways the test to determine how well driver's see around them, and how easily they are able to gather information from inside of the car, with the goal of minimizing the time spent not looking ahead. This means being able to gather information from inside and around the car faster. It's good to know they're thinking about that sort of thing.

I suppose that's why many cars now come with "blind spot" mirrors, the small part of the external mirrors that is angled further out, to help the driver to know what's to the sides of the vehicles. It's amazing, now that I think of it, that there was only an outside mirror on the driver's side of most cars until the early 1980s.

There's a technique for adjusting your mirrors that for years has served me well, allowing me to completely eliminate the blind spots and to do without the extra mirrors. You can read about it on the Car and Driver website. Essentially, the goal is to point the outside mirrors away from the car, rather than straight down the sides as most people do. When the mirrors look straight back, you see much of the same thing that your inside mirror shows. The technique I've used as a starting point is to move my head over toward the window and aim the mirror straight back from that vantage point, then to move my head as far right as possible and do the same thing with the right side mirror. When you move back to the center, you have the mirrors set so that any car passing you on either side will move into the side mirror as it moves out of the rear-view mirror. This isn't precise, however, so you have to make adjustments. If done properly, cars passing you will not move out of the view of the side mirror until they have begun to move into your peripheral vision. Voila! No blind spot!

But manufacturers are still putting the blind spot mirrors on the outside mirrors, and it turns out to be a necessity. With the HHR I just bought, I realized very quickly that the view out the back is narrow. Besides the wide edges of the hatch making the window smaller, the rear-seat headrests obscure a lot of the view. This means that I have to aim the outside mirrors more directly back, because I still want vehicles disappearing from the rear-view to show up immediately in the outside mirrors. The result is a restricted side view. So I solved the problem:

I solved it by adding convex blind-spot mirrors. The hard part is getting used to looking in them.