"Huge" wrote in message
...
On 2015-09-21, Mike Barnes wrote:
NY wrote:
"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Mike Barnes wrote:
My car lowers the mirror when I put it in reverse. I didn't see the
point of that feature so I disabled it in the setup menu. I guess
different people use the mirrors differently.

Can be handy to see the kerb when parking. On my car you disable it by
moving the switch which selects which mirror you want to adjust.

Not just handy but virtually essential when parking as close as possible
to
a kerb without actually touching it or when parking centrally between
two
white lines in a car park, when you can't see the kerb/lines except with
a
mirror or a reversing camera.

It's difficult to be sure without experimenting but I suspect that I can
see well enough with the (quite large) mirror in its normal position.

And when I'm reversing into my garage (by far my most common reversing
manoeuvre), the best position for the mirror is the normal position.

One of the first things I do with a new car is switch off those damn
auto-lowering mirrors. They're too slow and half the time they stop
in the wrong place. I'm perfectly happy to waggle my head about so I
can see.

The mirrors on my Peugeot are painfully slow when adjusted manually, so I
usually press the switch in the last few yards while I'm driving along the
road to the point where I start to reverse into the drive, but the ones on
the Honda move very quickly so I can wait until they move down as I engage
reverse. On both cars, the fully-down position is just right to show the
rear wheel and a few inches to the left of it.

Either way, it is essential for me that the mirrors *do* move, because
there's no way that I can move sufficiently far, while remaining in
controllable reach of the pedals and without passing sideways through the
driver's door and vertically through the roof (!), to be able to see the
rear wheels of my car with the passenger's door mirror in its normal
position.

I'm baffled that people can ever manage to reverse without lowering the
mirrors when the only reference points are lines/kerbs at ground level
rather than waist high hedges or walls.

Obviously a reversing camera makes life a lot easier, but I haven't had the
Honda long enough to learn to trust that entirely, without corroborating
that view with the one from the passenger's door mirror, to make sure I park
close enough to the kerb to leave room for the Peugeot to get out and
without going over the kerb onto the lawn: it's difficult to line up with
something that you can no longer see!

The other problem I have with my Peugeot is that its one reversing light is
so dim that the tarmac of the drive, the concrete kerb stone and the green
grass all look virtually the same brightness at night when "lit" by the
reversing light, even if the mirror *is* showing the right view. I'd paint
the concrete kerbstone with white paint but SWMBO says "no way".