The view from the driver's seat with a digital side rear-view mirror on the Hyundai Ioniq 6.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
Digital side rear-view mirrors are intended to be a safety enhancement – an improvement on the real thing. After using them here in the U.K. during a month-long visit, for 2,500 kilometres of daily driving in a Hyundai Ioniq 6, I’m not convinced.
In principle, they’re a great idea. Aerodynamic cameras are mounted exactly where the side mirrors would normally be, just outside the driver and passenger windows. Their images are displayed on screens inside the car, and those images are clear and enhanced in poor light. They can be adjusted to show a wider angle if desired, and combine with a blind-spot monitor to warn the driver when there’s another vehicle alongside, or just close.
Such digital mirrors are currently illegal in Canada and the United States, where physical reflective mirrors are still required because, well, that’s how they’ve been described for years as what are required.
“While the Ioniq 6 can be equipped with digital side-view monitors in other markets, for regulatory reasons, physical mirrors are required in Canada and the U.S.,” says Jenn McCarthy, a spokesperson for Hyundai Canada. “Several [manufacturers] including Hyundai are participating in an ongoing study on this matter, led by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the U.S. We support NHTSA’s efforts to ensure these systems provide the same level of safety as the rear-view mirrors currently required in North America.”
Cameras can outperform side mirrors. Why don’t cars have them in Canada?
Best of all, in the Ioniq 6, the mirror screens incorporate two small, virtual lines that are displayed when the indicator is used: a red/orange line that shows a distance of three metres behind the car’s rear bumper, and a yellow line that shows a distance of 12 metres behind the rear bumper. You wouldn’t want to change lanes safely at speed if a vehicle shows itself to be ahead of that nearest line, which leaves about a comfortable car’s length of distance ahead of the vehicle alongside and behind.
Once I got used to it, I found those two lines to be very useful. A warning triangle showed itself on the screen if there was a vehicle alongside and ahead of that nearmost digital line, which took the guesswork out of safe lane changes. The farther, yellow line was really only there to add some additional perspective.
However, after a month of daily driving, I never got used to it. I’ve been looking in my side mirrors now for more than four decades, and in that month in the U.K., I never once looked first at the screen beside the steering wheel. Every single time I wanted to see what was behind me on the driver’s side, I looked first out of the window at where the mirror would be, and then in at the screen beside my hand on the wheel. It was just reflex – every single time. This wasted a half-second or more when quick decisions were sometimes needed.
This was a non-issue on the passenger side, where I was already turning my head to look at a larger sweep of view to see the mirror, and could see the interior display screen right beside it.
I was concerned that the side rear-view screens might give me a headache, just as a digital windshield mirror can do. I wear prescription glasses to drive, and I’m used to seeing a clear view up ahead on the road; when I look in the mirror, I expect to focus on the view far behind, but a digital rear-view mirror means I need to focus on the screen itself, just an arm’s length from my eyes. The constant refocusing can be tiring, but for some reason – I don’t know why – this was never an issue with the larger screens of the digital side mirrors.
In slow-moving traffic, however (and there’s plenty of that in the U.K.), it’s expected that you might change lanes even when there’s a vehicle fairly close behind in the lane alongside. The side digital mirrors only demarcate the generous car’s-length distance behind, and if I waited until it was clear, whatever vehicle was immediately behind me would already be moving over into that parallel space. I used shoulder checks to be certain of my clearances whenever traffic was shuffling along, and whenever I negotiated a multi-lane roundabout.
I’m sure I’d get used to this, given enough time, and that younger drivers, with less ingrained habits, will adapt more easily. People who drive a second vehicle with traditional mirrors will undoubtedly be more challenged, however, and will still glance first at the outside camera before checking the screen when assessing a split-second decision.
The enhanced rear view on the screens is often an improvement, but not always. Car headlights could still be dazzling streaks and the camera lenses could still fog over before their heaters would clear them.
A greater concern, though, was that the stalk-mounted cameras can be set to turn themselves inward for security when the car is parked and locked, just like regular mirrors, and twice, they failed to turn themselves back out into place when the Ioniq 6 was unlocked. This was probably because of ice and below-freezing temperatures and it could be easily fixed by relocking and unlocking the car to reboot everything.
This wasn’t a problem on one frosty morning, when I saw the mirror still inward and fixed it. It was a horrific problem on one dark night, however, when I jumped into the car and set off onto a four-lane road with the camera still pointed at the door. I assumed the dark image on the screen meant the road behind me was empty of traffic, but it was not. When I approached a slower car ahead, I glanced first in the centre mirror and saw nothing, and then out the driver’s window and at the screen and saw nothing, and signalled to change lanes. At the last moment, a loud horn jolted me back and a faster car flashed past from behind.
Roads in the U.K. countryside can be very dark, with no street lighting and constant cloud cover. It took a while for me to see the camera was pointed at the door, not at the road behind, and to realize the rear-view screen was useless.
The solution to this, of course, is to not rely on your mirrors but always fall back on shoulder checks, which I usually do because I ride a motorcycle and bikes often have poor mirrors. I don’t want to lose this four-decade habit. In this case, though, I was growing comfortable with the technology and began to rely on it, and it let me down. In my view, technology has a way of doing that, often when you least expect it, and that’s never a good thing.