I know someone who locked his keys in the car on Thursday. He went to buy some stuff, opened the boot using the button on the key. Put the keys down, filled the boot and shut the boot lid. You can guess where the keys were.
To make it worse he called a family member to bring a spare key but the car park was locked by the time they got back and I ended up taking him over to get the car on Friday.
Parking sensors are fine for telling you that obstructions are there - somewhere. But they are useless for going one stage further and telling you exactly where they are in relation to part of your car so you can manoeuvre close to the obstruction while letting you avoid touching it. And of course they can't detect a kerb or car park lines so you can line yourself up neatly with it.
For that you need something visual such as a suitably angled mirror or a camera.
Incidentally, I find that my Honda's reversing camera, although fairly low res, is good enough to use for positioning and avoiding obstacles even though it's far lower-res than a mirror would be.
If there is any obstruction behind the car, you want to avoid hitting it?
Nor have I ever needed help to see the lines between parking spaces in a car park. Different with a kerb - I like to park tight to it - to minimise being hit by a passing vehicle.
Must admit I've no experience of such a camera. In most carparks (supermarkets etc) I park nose in to have easy access to the boot.
There was one in the Toyota Auris hybrid we hired over the summer.
Apart from the small detail that, in the wet, the lens got covered in spray in short order - frankly, it was an utter gimmick. It was quicker and easier to use the mirrors, as well as telling you more about what was there.
And the rear vision was shit.
Mind you, the whole car was utterly mediocre.
Interesting in that the Honda people carrier I sometimes drive has a superb rear view camera and 8" display and works in all weathers that I have experienced. The car also has side proximity sensors which tell you if you are about to hit someone in the blind spots which seem endemic with mirrors.
It's never caused me any bother. You can see both the kerb and the edge of your car from the normal seating and mirror position.
It might have been like that but faulty. The keys were placed in the boot while I lifted my bike in the back, then I forgot to pick them up. Maybe the sensor wasn't good enough to pick them up back there.
Only if you don't actually use the mirrors often enough, then don't actually turn your head and look properly before you change lanes.
Earlier this year I was on a preserved Bristol RE (single beck bus) travelling to Salisbury to take part in a special event organised for the local bus company when the throttle cable snapped ...
Go-Ahead sent out a replacement bus and a van with no fewer than three mechanics.
We were carted off to Salisbury so didn't know what happened until much later in the day.
The linkage is accessible through a hatch half way along the coach floor. A length of string was fastened to it, then the other end was tied to a screwdriver.
One man stood beside the driver, facing backwards with the screwdriver in his hands taken instructions from his colleague, who was driving.
The third man followed them back to Salisbury with their van.
The fact that all three men were needed suggests that someone knew (or guessed) exactly what was going to happen
You got a better work-around for a snapped throttle cable on something with the engine half-way back?
I find it easier that the mirrors for parking bays because the one view in the camera screen shows you directly behind (which neither mirror shows) and both sides - all simultaneously.
When trying to line yourself up equidistant from both lines, it's easier to use a single view with projected lines that mark the extremities of car's width, as if continued behind the car, whereas with mirrors you can only see one side at a time you so have to keep looking alternately one side to the other as you move backwards to check that you are still equidistant. And reference points (like our towbar) show when the back of the car is as close as it's safe from the rear kerb (or another car): again, a mirror doesn't show that.
For parking next to a kerb, I prefer to use my left mirror because it gives a better view of the rear tyre and how close it is to the kerb.
Anything that shows the view behind but doesn't also show part of your vehicle (or virtual lines which are fixed in relation to your vehicle) to compare the two is virtually no use in parking. All it tells you is "there is a hazard *somewhere* behind" without telling you where and therefore how close you are to it.
So with the mirrors set to show you the cars that you are overtaking or that are about to overtake you, you can also see the kerb and part of your car such as the rear wheels so you can line up wheels with kerb as you parallel park?
They must be enormous mirrors and/or convex.
With mine set for normal driving I can see about 2" below the door handles of the rear doors, but no lower; I have to tilt them a long way down to show the rear tyres. This is on a Peugeot 308. Even on a Honda CR-V, with larger (taller) mirrors I still have to tilt them, though not quite as far. I've tried leaving them fixed and half-standing and moving towards the passenger seat to change my field of view but I can't get close even with my head touching the ceiling (perhaps I need a sunroof to poke my head out of!). And clutch/accelerator control is difficult when you're raised out of your seat, leaning towards the passenger side and not sitting properly.
Modern cars have much worse visibility for reversing than my first car - a Renault 5. Though even with that I'd try to park on the offside of the road so I could open the window and tilt the mirror down (non-electrically!) if necessary to avoid hitting the kerb while making sure I was a close to it as possible so I wasn't sticking out into the road.
This reminds me of the hair-raising experience I had when I was learning to drive. I was driving up a steep hill on a country lane, in second, so the engine was going quite fast. As I levelled out at the top, and started to change up, the engine raced a bit, but I thought I'd just cocked-up my clutch/accelerator coordination. In third, I let the clutch in and the car shot off as if it had been catapulted forwards. The fact that the accelerator pedal was stuck down and didn't feel right made me realise immediately what had happened: the throttle had jammed open.
The first urge is to press the clutch to stop the car surging forward, but I instinctively knew that releasing the mechanical load on the engine would be a Bad Idea as the engine would go even faster. With great presence of mind I jammed my foot on the brake and very gently turned the ignition key just far enough to kill the engine without engaging the steering lock. I even remembered to dip the clutch just before we came to a halt so the car wouldn't lurch to a sudden stop.
Dad drove back home by feeding the cable back into the sheath and jamming it a bit above idling, and then using the choke's slow running control to vary the engine speed a bit. All went well until about 200 yards before the turning into our drive when he instinctively blipped the throttle to keep the car going when it looked as if it was going to stop short - and of course the thing jammed open again so we entered the drive with the engine screaming away.
You don?t need anything like the resolution of a mirror and can have proper night lighting too.
So cheap to replace that I'd rather have the much better service.
But are useless with bollards etc.
But if you are reversing into a parking bay, you are likely to want to keep reversing so you avoid hitting one of the other cars and that is much better done with a camera than a reversing sensor.
I normally do too, but that's because its easier to park nose in because I don?t have tilting mirrors or any cameras.
I'm still sure that cameras at the 4 corners of the car would be much more useful than any mirror can be with parking and avoiding running over little kids and small animals.
And a well implemented system would continuously loop the cameras onto the SSD so you have the evidence you need when someone gouges your car in the carpark when you are out of the car too. Something no mirror can do.
Much better to be able to see the wheels themselves, and to be able to do that in the dark too.
Then it was badly designed, because it is one obvious way the keys could be left in the car.
Did you forget where your wheels are? I often don't even look in the wingmirror. As I reverse in, I know how close I'm going to be to the kerb by the angle I've steered at, which is always the same. The only thing I watch is the car behind me and the car in front.
I'm going for a fault.
I'm not so lucky as to be able to always steer in at the same angle. There are so many variables: have you stopped exactly the same distance horizontally and lengthways from the car in front? Is the gap slightly larger or much larger than your car? Has the car in front (your reference point) parked close to the kerb or further away?I almost always manage to reverse park in two manoevres (reverse at an angle, then move forward and straighten up) yet I doubt if anything else is at all reproduceable - every case is different. I react to the situation as it unfolds. I'm sure I have an average angle that I use, but any variation about that will affect how far you need to go back before turning.
If you can park by estimation and prior planning alone, without needing constant feedback of "keep going until you see your wing/wheel/other reference point close to the kerb", then start to turn, then you are very lucky. But then I've always been someone who needs to do things by measurement and feedback - I was probably born without the estimation gene! Unlike my wife who can see/hold two very similar objects (eg potatoes) one after the other and can instinctively say which is the larger/heavier - I need to compare them side by side.
As I said earlier, my mirrors, when set normally, don't show any extremity of my car, so knowing position of wheel relative to corner of wing (or whatever reference point I use) doesn't help.
And in response to your earlier comment about dithering because I don't know the width of my car when I meet another car on a single track road, I don't find this a problem. The margin of error there is much greater - you don't normally pass another car when there's only a couple of inches between your car and his or between your car and a wall/ditch on the left. When parking, you need to be much more accurate than that: two inches to the left and your tyre has mounted the kerb; two inches to the right and you are sticking out further into the road than you need to be.
Instinctively I find I leave a much greater distance on the left than I need to when passing a row of parked cars and there are oncoming cars so I don't want to be any further over than I have to be. I imagine that this is because the nearside is harder to see accurately to judge the distance, and requires you to look away from straight ahead to line up a reference point on the car (eg nearside windscreen washer nozzle on bonnet) with the vehicles I'm passing, whereas I can judge the distance from the oncoming cars more accurately because I'm looking straight along. It takes a lot of willpower to go that bit closer and know that despite appearances, I'm not about to scrape the parked car that I'm passing.
This thread has been quite an eye-opener - to learn that there are some people who are able to line up with a kerb or parking lines without using aids like mirrors to compare part of my car against the reference point on the ground. Naively I thought that everyone did this - and that is why mirrors that drop automatically when you go into reverse, in anticipation of needing that view, were deigned that way. Evidently "real men" don't need aid like that.
Without door mirrors, I've find parallel parking or reversing into a parking bay *accurately* very difficult (*). Without a parking camera or parking sensors it might take me a bit longer in a modern car with poor visibility, but I'd manage - as I have for the first 25 years I've been driving!
(*) I could do it, but there's more risk that I might hit the kerb one day or end up 6" from it the next, or that I'd be closer to one side of the parking bay than the other or end up not quite parallel to the lines. It's a shame that car parks don't make more use of vertical lines on the wall behind the bays so you have something that you can see without needing to look at ground level.
Really? I find the normal resolution camera and monitors pretty useless if expecting mirror quality. Probably even more so if working in a night time mode.
I've not needed to replace a mirror. And I'm willing to bet either a dealer supplied camera or monitor would cost rather more...
Eh? Mine reacts to anything behind. And slightly to the sides. And the sensors are on the bumper, so the most rearward part. No camera can possibly do the same.
Have you ever had a car with decent reversing sensors? Sounds like you haven't.
I've not owned a car with a reversing camera - but wasn't impressed by the one I drove fitted with one. And it also had reversing sensors...
Rear view cameras can have viewing angles approaching 180 degrees. If you haven't experienced a good rear view system you have no real comparison.
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