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posted by
Fnord666
on Thursday January 02 2020, @04:15AM
from the What-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.
from the What-could-possibly-go-wrong dept.
Mirrors have been an integral part of motor vehicles for over a century. The low tech solution has solved the major visibility issues involved with driving and now car makers think they can do one better using cameras instead of mirrors. This may be an improvement in large trucks where visibility using mirrors can be poor to the point that obstacles directly in front and behind the vehicle cannot be seen but for cars it may prove to be a theft opportunity.
Best not to mount a mirror, or indeed a camera, directly in the line of fire of a neighboring car door in the parking lot. Maybe someone should tell them about the practicalities of life?
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Cameras to Replace Mirrors on Cars and Trucks
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @05:48PM (2 children)
Why would the camera also break? The camera wouldn't need to be sticking out as far as the camera and the camera wouldn't need to be repositionable the way that a mirror would because it would be feeding into a monitor, not reflecting back to a driver's eyes that may be positioned as much as a foot off from standard positioning.
Place the camera in a nice steal frame and the likelihood of it being damaged, even in a rollover crash, is minimal. A camera is pretty much only going to break if you fire lasers at it or it fails due to age. But, considering the number of dashcams that have been on the road for years, there should be plenty of data about how long the cameras will last and at what point they need to be replaced. Chances are the cameras themselves will outlive the car they're attached to in most cases. And by the time they need replacing, the procedure will be pretty cheap. The action camera I've got was like $80 and the camera for the mirror replacement would likely be less than that. Probably no more than $200 in total between parts and labor to replace.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @09:02PM
The camera itself is one area of failure. The related systems to the camera can fail rendering the camera as good as broken. Anywhere along the line, the electrical system is an area of failure. The camera output display would be another area of failure. There is also the possibility of software failure but I make the assumption that camera software is so reliable that we can rely on them to be reliable, I could very well be wrong in this particular assumption.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 04 2020, @07:29AM
Because that one way is physically smashing the device and those cameras are every bit as susceptible to such as mirrors are. As for the other ways a camera can break, AC already enumerated several and I don't really feel like debugging idiocy so I'll just drop the obvious "malicious software fuckery that you have no way of detecting" and go have a cigarette.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.