As you know, I have a rather long commute on my commuting days. I’ve noticed a peculiar tendency amongst drivers using the visors in their cars. Many of them will be driving happily along, with the visor flipped down in front of them behind the windshield. Only… The Sun is 90º to their left. The visor does no good.
I’m aware that people complain the visor is never long enough for shielding them from the side. Maybe people think, ‘It isn’t going to work anyway. Why bother?’ Or maybe oblique sunlight doesn’t bother some people. But I always wonder if they just don’t know that their visors turn that way.
I’ve often wished for a separate side visor, at least on the driver’s side. I hate having to flip the thing back and forth when turning corners or going around curves.
Plus the visor is never big enough to block the sun coming from the side window. It is neither long enough or deep enough. IMHO auto manufacturers should use separate visors for the side windows.
My dad’s Tahoe has an extension on the visor that you can pull out to make it longer when it’s on your side (or maybe the whole visor slides out, I don’t remember).
Even if the visor doesn’t block the sun directly, I find that it often times still decreases the total amount of light reaching my smoking eyeholes for a wee bit of relief. Not always tho.
Here’s a bad picture of the Tahoe/Suburban Visor. When it’s swung out to the left, there’s an extension that pulls out to blind most of the window, but that top flap is still there so you can flip it down in front of you for when the sun is come in from the corner.
Nearly every visor either has an extension that slides out, or slides out itself from the door-side attachment point. I think a lot of people just don’t know they do that.
I think visors that extend or have an extension are the exception, not the rule.
[Runs out to car]
Well, I’ll be.
My Honda does it. But it doesn’t slide very easily, I never would have noticed it on my own and it certainly wouldn’t have ever slid by itself no matter what I did to the car (unlike, say, turning hard and having swing around).
I, like others, never even used it when the sun was coming from almost behind me. All they had to do was put a little set of left/right arrows on it and I would have known exactly what they meant.
Yeah, if the whole visor moves they’re usually fairly tight. When I got my current VW I had to grab it with both hands and pull the first time I used it. It was obvious the guy who owned it for the first 16K miles hadn’t. But this is Florida, and if I didn’t have it I’d be dead by now. It’s also probably not obvious to many people that you can unclip the visor in the first place, since the hinge doesn’t really look like the visor is supposed to pop out.
Several years ago I drove a Chevy Blazer. It was an okay vehicle, nothing too exciting about it- except the visors. There were actually two visors, the main one and a smaller one right behind that one. The main one swiveled over to block the sun on the side, but the smaller one only pivoted up and down. The main one also had an extension that could slide out of it, so you could block the entire width of the side window if you needed to.
Damn, I could use that feature on my new truck. Why aren’t there any real aftermarket visor options?
It’s also probably not obvious to many people that you can unclip the visor in the first place, since the hinge doesn’t really look like the visor is supposed to pop out.