The desperate lack of good driver education in this country not only shows up in many drivers’ inability to exercise good car control in critical situations, but also in how they set up their driving position even before the car starts moving. For example, many drivers set their side view mirrors to duplicate the view in their rearview mirror, not to cover the car’s side blind spots.
BMW has a solution for that little problem: Do away with side view mirrors altogether.
At the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, BMW brought an i8 on which cameras on stalks replaced the traditional side view mirrors. To the side cameras, BMW added two more cameras in the upper rear window frame racing rearward. All four cameras feed a display that looks a lot like a rearview mirror, but it isn’t.
It’s a rear- and side view display. A computer melds all the images from the four cameras to provide the driver with a seamless, real-time video of what’s happening to the sides and rear of the car. It looks for all the world like a rearview mirror, except that there are no blind spots and no matter how many people or how much junk you stuff into the car’s back seat, you still get an unobstructed view of what’s happening around you.
It makes sense that BMW chose the i8 to demonstrate the new system, since the low and wide sports car’s rear view is not all that large and the tiny trunk forces some i8 drivers to cram luggage into the rear seat. However, the results are remarkable and if BMW owners could get used to the spindly camera stalks instead of streamlined mirror pods, they would realize that the “whole view” concept is much safer.
Watch the video from CNet to see what we mean.
By 2018, the U.S. government had mandated that all vehicles under 10,000 pounds (except motorcycles) must have rear-view cameras that activate when the vehicle is put into reverse. We’re not sure if BMW’s mirrorless camera system would satisfy the requirement, but it should.
BMW probably wouldn’t show this technology at CES if it didn’t intend to bring it—or something similar—to market in the near future. Our hope is that when they do, it has a reasonable cost. We’re probably dreaming when we wish for a version that is retrofittable on older Bimmers, but we’ll still dream of them anyway.—Scott Blazey
[Photos courtesy of BMW AG. Video courtesy of CNet.]
