One big question I have here is about Chesterton’s Fence. I don’t understand why they aren’t commonplace and it’d be, at minimum, helpful to understand the why.
Hopefully the answer is something like “the technology didn’t exist however many years ago and the DMV is slow to adapt”. But it also seems possible that they have researched it and found that it does more harm than good, eg. by adding more “visual noise” to the mirror.
When I think about problems like these, I use what feels to me like a natural generalization of the economic idea of efficient markets. The goal is to predict what kinds of efficiency we should expect to exist in realms beyond the marketplace, and what we can deduce from simple observations. For lack of a better term, I will call this kind of thinking inadequacy analysis.
I’m not really sure what sort of efficiency I would expect here. On the one hand, government agencies are supposed to study this sort of stuff and add new safety standards when it makes sense. On the other hand, it seems plausible that they’re just incompetent, poorly incentivized, and miss out on these sorts of low hanging fruits.
One thing to mention is that car manufacturers do hyper-optimize for official safety tests, so I consider the fact that any car manufacturers bother doing this even though it’s not on the safety test to be a very big point in its favor, and the fact that most of them don’t to be neutral.
I don’t think mirrors are considered in safety tests at all. My understanding is that the only requirement is that you meet the tech specs defined in Section 571.111 - Standard No. 111; Rearview mirrors.. These are all physical properties like the size, mounting and reflectivity. The regulations don’t require cars to have additional convex mirrors, so I think it’s unsurprising that car manufacturers mostly don’t bother to provide them.
There are definitely cars where they’re factory installed, like a lot of Ford vehicles and some models of various other cars. Also really large cars tend to have something similar, although they typically have an entire separate dedicated blind spot mirror.
I actually had the thought to buy one of these because a lot of rental cars have them (factory-installed) and I was annoyed that my own car didn’t.
As far as I can tell, these are and have always been legal in the US (it’s illegal for the main mirror to be convex, but adding an additional convex mirror is legal).
Newer cars are less likely to have these because they have fancier blind spot detection systems.
I find it confusing that they were never standard, but I get the impression that it’s a mix of:
Adding more parts to a factory mirror costs more (especially at the higher-quality people expect from factory parts)
Buyers don’t care (or the ones who do will buy a $5 stick-on)
Regulators don’t care
I do find this confusing though, since it doesn’t seem like anyone ever really argued that they’re bad, but also car manufacturers mostly don’t act like they’re important. I wonder if it has to do with the lack of direct research on how they affect crash risk.
Ah that all makes sense. I didn’t realize that some cars have them factory installed. That makes me feel very confident that the fact that their not commonplace isn’t actually some sort of fence protecting against some unknown thing.
One big question I have here is about Chesterton’s Fence. I don’t understand why they aren’t commonplace and it’d be, at minimum, helpful to understand the why.
Hopefully the answer is something like “the technology didn’t exist however many years ago and the DMV is slow to adapt”. But it also seems possible that they have researched it and found that it does more harm than good, eg. by adding more “visual noise” to the mirror.
I also think it’s helpful to perform an inadequacy analysis here.
I’m not really sure what sort of efficiency I would expect here. On the one hand, government agencies are supposed to study this sort of stuff and add new safety standards when it makes sense. On the other hand, it seems plausible that they’re just incompetent, poorly incentivized, and miss out on these sorts of low hanging fruits.
One thing to mention is that car manufacturers do hyper-optimize for official safety tests, so I consider the fact that any car manufacturers bother doing this even though it’s not on the safety test to be a very big point in its favor, and the fact that most of them don’t to be neutral.
So the mirrors only show the collision angles that are actually used in the officially approved safety tests?
Nice!
I don’t think mirrors are considered in safety tests at all. My understanding is that the only requirement is that you meet the tech specs defined in Section 571.111 - Standard No. 111; Rearview mirrors.. These are all physical properties like the size, mounting and reflectivity. The regulations don’t require cars to have additional convex mirrors, so I think it’s unsurprising that car manufacturers mostly don’t bother to provide them.
There are definitely cars where they’re factory installed, like a lot of Ford vehicles and some models of various other cars. Also really large cars tend to have something similar, although they typically have an entire separate dedicated blind spot mirror.
I actually had the thought to buy one of these because a lot of rental cars have them (factory-installed) and I was annoyed that my own car didn’t.
As far as I can tell, these are and have always been legal in the US (it’s illegal for the main mirror to be convex, but adding an additional convex mirror is legal).
Newer cars are less likely to have these because they have fancier blind spot detection systems.
I find it confusing that they were never standard, but I get the impression that it’s a mix of:
Adding more parts to a factory mirror costs more (especially at the higher-quality people expect from factory parts)
Buyers don’t care (or the ones who do will buy a $5 stick-on)
Regulators don’t care
I do find this confusing though, since it doesn’t seem like anyone ever really argued that they’re bad, but also car manufacturers mostly don’t act like they’re important. I wonder if it has to do with the lack of direct research on how they affect crash risk.
Ah that all makes sense. I didn’t realize that some cars have them factory installed. That makes me feel very confident that the fact that their not commonplace isn’t actually some sort of fence protecting against some unknown thing.