I’ve always positioned my side-view mirrors so that I could see what was beside me. Weird, I know; but that’s how I’ve always done it. Other people don’t. I was behind one guy a few months ago. We were in heavy traffic. When I was close to the rear of his car, I could see his full face in both side-view mirrors. He was using them as rear-view mirrors. I’ve seen women virtually using their side-view mirrors – and rear-view mirror – as vanity mirrors. So finally, there’s a video showing how to use your side-view mirrors the way they were intended to be used. (And no, I didn’t look for it. It was on the local news this morning. )
Note: If you scroll down past the video window and into the article, the video gets weird, at least on my Mac. It doesn’t ‘shrink’, so much as gets truncated into a corner, and I have to reload the page to get it back to regular size. It’s only 01:45.
Yep, I learned that video’s rule for setting of the side mirrors from *Car Talk *years ago. A lot of how other people use them has to do with how the colloquial speech keeps calling them “rearview” anyway so this creates a certain instinctual perception that the fields of view of the wing mirrors should overlap the field of view of the center rearview mirror.
Also, I have a feeling that especially since having them on both sides became standard (at least in the US it used to be only the one on the driver’s side was), but before backup cameras came along, many people use them in “see the whole side of the car” mode as an aid when backing in/out of parking spots, especially in cars where the shape of the bodies makes the actual point where the car ends not visible directly from the driver’s seat.
I figured that out a long time ago with my first RV. Changing lanes with a long vehicle that has a large blind spot area can be daunting. It’s a little odd at first not to see the side of your vehicle, but once your brain accepts that it’s still there and not going anywhere, that minor discomfort goes away. I admit to really liking the blind spot and backing alarms on my new car a lot. I wish the RV had the lane change alert, but it’s short enough that it’s not a real problem.
I started doing this a few years ago and have trained my teenagers to do the same. It really does help when driving to not have that blind spot. Of course, after decades of doing it the other way, I am still trained to do the paranoid double head check just in case before I change lanes.
I share the opinion that this mirror technique is superior to the traditional method, but I have always been afraid to try it for fear that my decades of instinct with the “wrong” method might cause confusion at the wrong moment.
So, I continue to look at a sliver of my car as I drive.
I use the side mirrors for side-views, but also have convex mirrors glued on upper lateral quadrants of them to compensate for my rearview mirror’s very poor coverage.
Let’s not forget that one should turn one’s head and check blind spots before changing lanes, too. I suppose the yellow dots are reliable enough these days, but I still can’t break the habit of turning my head.
I pretty much discovered it very early on in my driving career. I’m not sure how I happened upon it, but it just made logical sense to me to have left mirror, rearview mirror, and right mirror set to create one unbroken view of the road behind and to the sides of me. It’s completely natural to me, but I could see how it’s disconcerting if you’re not used to it, since you’re expecting a reference point of the side of your car.
I’ve been doing this for years too, but there are ALWAYS blind spots. Just because they are small doesn’t mean they are not there. When I first did this I thought I had no blind spot, and I almost hit a motorcyclist. I’m a motorcyclist and I know to look for them, and almost hitting them scared the hell out of me. One should always turn their head, just to make sure.
it seems weird to me to have more than the slightest sliver of the side of the car barely visible in the side mirrors for reference purposes. My dad and I are similar enough in build that if we trade vehicles, we don’t have to adjust the seat, or the rearview mirror. but his side mirrors are always turned too far in. Freaks me out to think about {me and other people driving around me} driving without being able to see as much as possible of what is beside/behind.
I position mine the correct way according to the OP’s link. Last time I got an oil change at Jiffy lube, the idiots messed with them and pointed them straight back, though.
Even if I see the slightest sliver, that’s way too in for me. I have to lean significantly to one side before I can see the side of my car with the mirror positioning. Basically, it’s set so that if there is a car behind and to the left of me, if I see one of his headlights in my driver’s side mirror, I see the other headlight in the rear-view mirror. Basically drivers mirror + rearview mirror equals complete picture with no redundancy or missing information (as close as I can come to it.) This is, at least for me, angled out a good way from seeing even the tiniest bit of the side of my car.
I will not set my side mirrors so wide I can’t see a sliver of the vehicle, for several reasons.
My work van has a useless rearview mirror, and so I need to see straight back with the side mirrors
Backing the van requires the use of the mirrors, and if you can’t see the back corner of the vehicle they’re useless for this purpose
Switching back and forth between my personal car with mirrors set wide and the van with the mirrors set in would mess with my brain’s ability to quickly process the information in the mirrors
Even in my little hatchback, the rearview mirror doesn’t afford the best view backwards due to the sloping roofline, and the view over the back corner in the side mirror compensates for this
I’m curious if any of the advocates for setting side mirrors wide ever need to back up using their mirrors. I tried it that way, and quickly abandoned the project.
Gorsnak: I don’t think there are many who want to see none of the side of their cars. Just that they are wide enough that you only see the rear corner of them.
I position mine so that a car approaching from the rear in an adjacent lane will be seen in the rearview mirror and as it disappears from that mirror it appears in the side mirror and as it disappears from the side mirror it appears in the side window. Theoretically no blind spots, though it is still possible to miss a car if you’re looking in the wrong mirror as it’s moving from one to the other. The problem blind spots in my car are the front pillars. They can easily obscure an entire car approaching an intersection.
Not here. You see absolutely none of it from the normal driving position. That’s the only way I could get them so there’s a continuous view from left mirror to rearview to right without redundancy. If I need to see the side of my vehicle when maneuvering, I move my body a little bit.
I can only see the back corner of my car if I’m leaning all the way over. (Well, it’s honestly a little bit less than all the way over.) That said, this is not how I set it. I set it while driving so when I have half a car in my left mirror, the other half is in the rearview. Same for the right.
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