Blind Spot Mirrors 738

On Mon, 9 Oct 2006, bucket

This is the same on my 2-door Punto. I have the wing mirrors adjusted so that in my normal seating position I can see a very thin strip of the car's wing and then the rest is to the rear-side, with the rear vanishing point about a quarter of the way down from the top. As a car overtakes me, it disappears from the outside edge of my mirror and at that point is just starting to overlap my rear end.

If I look at the mirror and to the side I cannot see the car. However the car is clearly visible if I glance quickly over my shoulder through the rear window. It's not so much a case of seeing the car in detail, but simply seeing that there's something there. My driving instructor got me into the habit of glancing briefly over my shoulder before lane changes, and it's something which never left me. If I forget to do it, the manoeuver 'feels' wrong. The glance requires me to look back to about 5 o'clock or 8 o'clock (treating forward as 12).

My instructor's car had a small blind-spot mirror on the lower outside edge of the pbuttenger wing-mirror. This was used mainly to buttist with parking and reversing around a corner, and I never really appreciated it for much else. When I pbutted he bought one for my car and I fitted it to the same area of my pbuttenger wing mirror. I use it to help me squeeze the car in on the drive without leaving the wheels on the dividing kerb. More recently I've started using it as part of all-round observations and on the motorway-A-roads as double-check after the shoulder glance. I tend to clock it as part of the head turning process.

Then recently I was out with an advanced driver who asked why I just had the one blind-spot mirror, and suggested that I get one for the driver's side too. Since I'd started using it in new ways anyway, I was already going to get around to that, so grabbed a matching one from Halfords and fitted that symmetrically on the driver's side. I now tend to use them both during shoulder glances, and it makes it much easier to park on the other side of the drive now too :-) The mirrors make it much easier to see if something has intruded into the blind-spot without the shoulder-glance and they do make motorway driving easier, especially in queing traffic where you might have something sitting in your pbuttenger side blind spot for some time. I'm mindful to not rely on them but when used sensibly they do help a lot.

The mirrors are low-profile (no surrounding ridge) stick-ons, the Summit 2" circular blind-spot mirrors from Halfords and probably Tesco and other places. In fact I bought two because I wanted them to be the same, not realising the one I had was already the same model, so I have one spare here now. If anyone was thinking of getting one and wants this one to start off, give me a shout and I'll stick it in the post.

Well my instructor was an advanced driver on numerous levels, and so was the chap I had in the car a couple of weeks ago, and they all think they're a useful additional item to have, especially on both wing mirrors.

-- Chris