The car we currently own (and have owned for the last 11 years) does not have a back-up camera. I have, however, rented a number of cars that have them and I have been a passenger in friends’ cars that have them. Just recently I rented a cargo van, that had no windows behind the driver’s and passenger’s seat, but it did have a back-up camera display in one side of the rear-view mirror.
In all of my experiences with them the cameras turned off once the vehicle was no longer in Reverse. For owners out there, is there an override for that? When I was driving the van, having that rear view would have been very useful for me to see directly behind, as the rear-view mirror was otherwise completely useless.
My car sometimes leaves the backup camera on due to a software glitch. I find it distracting (but I have a rear view mirror). I think there is a way to turn on the cameras in my wife’s Tesla while driving. I haven’t tried it.
You can typically set them so they stay on until you drive forward above a certain speed. With that in mind, if you’re stationary and want the camera on, put the car in reverse, then back into drive (or park or neutral). Then you have the reverse camera on, but no one behind you worried you’re about to back up since your reverse lights aren’t on.
I do, however, there was a button to just turn it on. My last car had a passenger side camera that turned on when I used my right blinker, but it could also be manually turned on and off.
Also, FWIW, they do sometimes get ‘stuck’ on and it’s really distracting. Maybe you’d get used to it, but I can’t imagine wanting it on while driving. In fact, if it happens when I’m driving more than a few miles, I’ll usually shut the car off and restart it as soon as I get to a stop sign or red light.
I can understand that, however, I’ll be renting (probably the same) a cargo van again in a few days and in this particular vehicle the display was in the left 1/4 of the rear-view mirror, so it sort of belongs, as opposed to a mini TV display of activity on the instrument panel.
We bought an after-market camera that I had intended on installing myself. When I started reviewing what was involved I decided that I’d rather just pay someone to do it, so I took it to a local repair shop. As I recall, the mechanic said it wasn’t particularly difficult (but then, he’s a mechanic).
I was initially a little disappointed that it only came on while in reverse, but I got over it
In many modern vans that have no natural visibility straight behind the driver, they have something that looks like the traditional rear view mirror mounted at the top center of the windshield. This device is a full-width display for a full-time rear-facing camera. So a completely synthetic “mirror” showing you what you’d see if the bed and cargo was transparent.
I’m very confused about the idea of a van you can’t see out the back of that had a conventional glass mirrors that’s useless, but uses only a part of that space to display a camera image.
I wonder if the person operating hte van did not know how to configure it properly?
It’s probably a standard cab with multiple cargo options. For example if you took a Ford Econoline and put a box on the back or a wall between the front and back, it would render the mirror useless, but it’ll still be there from the factory.
Third vote for really distracting. Rubber band your phone to the rear view mirror & have it play a video while driving to see how distracting it is. Even if you’re not trying to watch it, that constantly changing screen out of the corner of your eye is distracting.
I’ve seen people install them in their car but I haven’t seen a temporary install, like for the day or two of your rental; just suck it up & deal with it. You’re already not used to that vehicle, it’s dimensions, sight lines, acceleration & handling, or even how to operate the windshield wipers - left or right side of the stalk, & turn or push the end in to clean the windshield (in three cars, we have it on both sides & operating differently on the two that are on the same side)
Nope, that’s how their made. Here is but one example
Indeed I shall. I read the manual for the van online an hour ago and there’s no user override. Anyway, the critical thing is that it exists for backing.
My wife has a 20-year-old Prius she inherited from her mother. I installed this after-market stereo that fit in the car’s DIN-standard slot. As you can see, it came with a backup camera that displays on the unit’s large screen.
The camera simply mounts on top of the rear license plate, and you run the wires (in our case) through the inside of the rear hatch, where one lead connects to one of the backup lights to provide power when you go into reverse. You run the other wire (the video cable) through the soft plastic tube between the door and the body of the car that the other wires for the lights pass through.
Then you string the video cable through the car up to the front. This means fishing it through whatever open spaces you can find, under the carpet near the doors, then into the dash to come up behind the head unit. I had to take the dash apart to install the head anyway, so it was just a question of finding safe places for it to pass without interfering with any other controls or moving parts. A few cable ties hold it safely in place behind the dash. Plug it into the appropriate jack on the rear panel and check it out before you put everything back together.
Learning how to take the dash apart to access the back of the head unit will prove useful when the camera stops working for no apparent reason. (Ask me how I know.) When this happens, the apparent solution is just to look around at everything and put it back together without changing anything. Then it will start working again for no apparent reason. (This has happened to me twice in two years.)
I imagine that higher-end systems use wireless cameras, but this was a rather inexpensive unit.
There are plenty of YouTube videos that will show you how to do this, and you can probably find one for your specific car.
How would that be different from the constantly changing distracting scene in a plain old 1950s-style rear view mirror?
I totally agree that the large format rear-view display down on whatever vid screen on whatever sort of dashboard / instrument panel would be very distracting. But that’s not what we’re talking about. I think.
Do you find the rear view mirror distracting? I, too, have wished i could leave the backup camera on, at least while i pull forward during a parking maneuver. And sometimes when the back of the car is full of stuff blocking my visibility.
I’d been thinking to get a digital rearview to replace the standard rearview that uses camera/screen instead of mirror. This changed my mind in a way that made sense and also goes along with those saying it’s “distracting” … simply because it’s a light-generating screen.
I do have a dashcam but I found the best place for it is conveniently hidden from my driving view by the rearview mirror - I can see just the bottom edge of the screen to verify it’s on without being distracted by it.
I’d been tempted by the digital rearview for the promise of a greater FOV as well as hopefully being less annoying when lifted trucks are beaming their miniature suns into my eyeballs … It’s an auto-dimmer (no manual toggle) but the sensor is often blocked from headlights by the design of the rear windows! (you can see a shadow cast right where the sensor is, and no amount of readjusting seems to alleviate that. And no, the mirror won’t rotate 180 degrees either to put the sensor where most intruding headlights are. Awful design!)
