Hall of mirrors

1965 Chevelle SS, showing its pedestal door mount mirror. Photography by the author.

Remember when external mirrors were just used to see behind you? “No, I was always going too fast to care about what was back there. Haw haw.” Leave it to car makers to make a piece of reflective glass so complicated.

Once upon a time, recall, cars had no side mirrors at all. Want to see behind you? Swing your arm over that big bench seat and looked over your right shoulder, or park by Braille using chromed bumpers that weighed more than Honey Boo Boo’s extended family. In those days, America looked forward. Who needed mirrors to see where we’d come from?

Over time, side mirrors became optional–and then standard. (And then mandatory.) Only on the driver’s side at first, either on the door or mounted on the front fender. Round or square, on a little chrome pedestal mount. And so it was for a couple of decades. Soon, matching mirrors started popping up on the passenger’s-side of the car too.

This 1969 AMC SC/Rambler featured a “bullet” mirror on driver and passenger side.

Before long, these safety afterthoughts became genuine styling components; recall late 60s “bullet” mirrors on sports cars and the ’69 Hurst/Olds. More aerodynamic fairings came soon enough–witness the hilariously tiny side mirrors on a Fox-body Mustang dating clear back to 1979.

Adjust those mirrors by hand or, drumroll please … use a remote control! A little joystick more or less moved the lens in the direction you wanted, its controls requiring deftness of touch to make things just the way you wanted it. that was for the driver anyway; passengers had to make do with using their grubby fingers to sort out the mirror with the driver yelling at them to get it right.

Power controls stopped those arguments. But then the question arose: where do the electric mirror controls belong? On the door? On the console? On the dash? Together in one place, or separate (how many cars had remote passenger-side mirror wands living in the middle of the dash somewhere?

Bullet mirrors of a different shape on the 1970-’71 Ford Torino GT Sportsroof.

The very glass itself started changing. A convex lens, for the passenger’s side only, with the eternal OBJECTS MAY SEEM LARGER legalese writ large. Other countries offered convex lenses for the driver’s-side outside mirror too, which sounds useful, but this would not appear on a US car. Today, some cars come with a separate blind-spot mirror installed as a separate mirror alongside the standard mirror; my wife’s Ford Fiesta ST has this, on both the driver’s and passenger’s-side mirrors.

In the ‘80s, mirrors started blending in with bodywork–they still protruded, but they blended in with the bodywork. The ’82 Celica and Supra are among the earliest examples, but others followed: Ford Probe, ’93 Chevy Camaro and Pontiac Trans Am.

At some point, mirrors started folding–breakaway mirrors, they called ‘em, hinged as they were at their mounting point on the door. Whether it was a safety issue (pedestrians were less likely to be hurt–and sue–if they were clipped by a folding mirror with some give) or a repair cost issue (clumsy drivers’ wallets less likely to be hurt if the mirror had some give) remains unknown. Better still, a feature that quickly gained approval in countries like road-width-challenged Japan: power folding mirrors. Even in the late ‘80s, you touch a button, and the side mirrors automatically fold in. The definition of luxury: why tuck the mirrors in yourself when you can do so at the push of a button?

The dinky “aero” mirrors of the 1980s, as seen on a 1985 Ford LTD LX.

For sloppy weather, we’ve seen both little wipers and defroster lines within the glass, in order to make the glass itself more easily visible, and to clear away the muck. And now there’s light-sensitive glass too, so that the oaf behind you who forgot to click off his brights won’t singe your tender retinas. (No point in adjusting the mirror to reflect back at the dopey driver behind you to try and blind him in a pitiful show of revenge). For those who can’t see the drivers behind them, blind-spot monitors light up and/or beep when there’s someone hiding in your B-pillar.

Turn signals showed up in sideview mirrors more than a decade ago; first in the mirror face, so people behind could see on large pickups that might be towing something that blocks the lights. Then there were ambers that would show people in front and from the side too. And now there are lights that don’t signal anything, but project an image on the ground when you open the door. Hello 2015 Mustang. How long until there’s an in-dash screen that lets you program scrolling messages like a Times Square billboard, for oncoming traffic to read as you idle at a traffic light, or else project emojis to let everyone else know that you’re grumpy about sitting in traffic too?

Back in the good old 1980s, when aerodynamics were all the rage, there was talk of using prismatically-reflected light to act as a mirror with reduced exposure outside the car; the image itself would be reflected inside the car. The idea never went anywhere, but technology has advanced. Now, with backup cameras the norm, how long until we get aerodynamically-negligible side-view cameras with internal A-pillar monitoring? And more importantly, how long until the inevitable backlash, and cars get retro-vibe mirrors with little chrome pedestals that do nothing but reflect light?