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Great, another unneeded feature forced down our throats at additional cost to who? You guessed it, consumers!
by hallway_monitor 5y ago
Great, another unneeded feature forced down our throats at additional cost to who? You guessed it, consumers!
- myself248 5y agoYeah, drives me nuts. Some cars have really great rear visibility and should be exempt from the requirement. I understand it on SUVs and stuff though.
- zelos 5y agoWouldn't the entire rear of the car and the rear seats have to be glass to exempt a car from having the camera? A bigger rear window wouldn't have let me see the toddler who'd wandered a short distance off from his parents in a car park and was standing right behind my car.
- myself248 5y agoLook at the split rear window on the Prius; it does exactly that. If the driver is tall and turning their neck, or short and using the center mirror, the sight-line from the driver's seat extends below the rear seats and down into what would ordinarily be the tailgate. You can't see the pavement under the bumper, but you can see a kid on a tricycle right behind the car. Personally I find rear view cameras to be quite disorienting. The view is quite distorted by the wide-angle lens and it's not clear where it can see and where it can't. Do I still have blind spots if I look at only the screen? Where are they? With a mirror I get an intuitive sense of what it can and can't see. Also, I expect the view to move when I move my head like in a mirror, which is part of what makes it so easy to get a sense of where the mirror can see. I suppose someday I'll get used to cameras, but today is not that day.
- astrange 5y agoDo they still sell any cars with good rear visibility? My hatchback has about the best you could get (and they don't sell it here anymore) and I still added a backup camera, it's very useful.
- thedevelopnik 5y agoI used to pride myself on my ability to fit into small parking spaces and parallel park even big vans pretty precisely, and a backup camera blew all that out of the water because I can fit anywhere now. My little GTI with a backup camera made me an invincible parking machine.
- rswail 5y agoWhy? You have a screen, the cameras are so small as to be undetectable, they add safety and they provide much better coverage than mirrors do. It also enables auto-parking and other enhancements while not inhibiting anyone that wants to perform those functions manually.
- hodgesrm 5y agoWell, you could also say the same about seat belts and ABS. I very much prefer cars with cameras at this point.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Teever 5y agoI think parents who have lost their children to cars backing out of driveways while children are playing on the sidewalk would disagree with your description of 'unneeded'
- wowokay 5y ago
- renewiltord 5y agoThis is true. Any kid who is capable of naming themselves has also opted out of child safety. The two characteristics are irreversibly linked. In addition, the existence of kids who are capable of naming themselves must mean that other kids should be bumper mush. This is the only way to preserve the American Way.
- elevader 5y agoThat's classical victim blaming. We are all humans and make mistakes.Some mistakes only result in some property damage or money lost and some, like running over a person (doesn't even have to be a child, don't forget that there are handicapped people who might not be able to react fast enough to get out of that situation), can't be corrected afterwards. Handwaving that away because some people like to save a few dollars is not a great idea. By your logic we could also hand everybody heroin and an assault rifle and abolish most laws, people watch TV after all and therefore can be taught not to do bad things.
- notreallyserio 5y agoDon't get me started on turn signals! Who's paying for these features? That's right, Joe Consumer. People just need to learn how to use hand signals.
- bregma 5y agoTurn signals are not what makes a car expensive. Look at BMWs.
- jedberg 5y agoIt’s not unneeded, it’s there to prevent you from killing someone, just like every other required safety system.
- jacobolus 5y agoGreat, another feature that will save dozens to hundreds of lives (disproportionately of young children) every year, while adding only a few bucks to the bill of materials for cars that already have a display screen.
- Moru 5y agoI do wish parents would stop teaching kids to take the short route over the carpark on the way to school. They save a couple of meters but walk behind cars backing out of the car garages... The back camera is handy but you won't see them if they walk on your side of the lane, too close to the 90 degree edge of the car. And to make it more fun, our car has an overlay on the left edge with a top down view of the sensors around the car. That one blocks the view completely in that edge. And has a black background window that slowly fades away.
- Tagbert 5y agoAlso demanded by customers. A well implemented backup camera is much better than trying to use a small rear view mirror or twisting around to look out a small rear window. The backup camera can give you a wider field of view including low down where a small child might be. It is also much brighter in the dark than your eyes normally see. This doesn’t mean that I am not also checking the surroundings but the backup camera is such a big improvement that I would not buy any car without one.