Diatribe: Reflecting on the history of rearview mirrors

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It’s time for another chapter of “I remember” and today’s subject is rearview mirrors. Not the ones inside your car. I’m talking about the ones outside.

When I was a kid there were a lot of things that were not included on new cars. 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 those mirrors were futuristic-looking chrome jobs that were really shiny and eye catching without being gaudy, which was not easy to come by considering we lived in Indiana. 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’m providing 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 adjusting the mirror for the driver. I can still hear my mother whining about having to open the window because it was cold outside.

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. Technology sure is grand! Only trouble was that often 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 go down and the mirror was adjusted by hand. So much for technology.

The ultimate gestation of the external rearview mirror came when every manufacturer began equipping vehicles with power-adjusted units as standard equipment. Oh happy day! This wonderment of automotive engineering was almost 100 percent reliable. Eventually outside mirrors became palettes of their own for things like turn signal arrows and blind spot information system warnings. Heck, some of them are even heated and tinted.

One more reflection on the mirrors: I remember seeing pictures of some of the post-World War II automobiles built in Japan. They always had the outside rearview mirrors way forward on the front fenders. I never knew the reason for that and it didn’t make sense to me to have a mirror too far away to adjust from the driver’s seat.

But as I recall, Japanese driving was much more polite and safe back then. Drivers were more courteous as well. Eventually the Japanese began to move their outside mirrors to the door like Western cars and just like moving to a more Western diet caused an increase in heart attacks and cancers, so, too, did the change of mirror position create more car crashes.

Who could have predicted what would happen in the future? The reason it’s so apparent now is that, by definition, the job of a rearview mirror is to show what’s behind you.

Al Vinikour is a Midwest-based freelance auto writer. Proving a mind is a “terrible thing to use” he sometimes sits in traffic and ponders about things — generally auto-related — that make him mad. Believing the “pen is mightier than the sword” (and generally results in a whole lot less jail time), he vents his anger through a word processor and produces the Driver’s Side Diatribe column. E-mail him at vinikour@comcast.net.