It's getting harder than ever to see out of modern "safer" cars, too. I regularly entirely lose cars hidden by the B-pillar on my Model 3. I have to rock my head back and forth before each lane change to make sure something's not hidden there. It's compounded by the fact that the driver's side mirror doesn't physically move far enough to the left to cover the blind spot like it would in most cars, and our terrible flat mirrors in the US don't provide the wide angle that european driver's side mirrors have. (still working on sourcing a european mirror glass; currently Tesla only sells the entire mirror body+motors+glass as a single part, for $400ish)
It's VERY easy to lose a pedestrian in the A-pillar (windshield pillar) of modern cars, particularly due to how large these units have gotten to accommodate side curtain airbags.
Note that the fixtures on the body don't have to 100% optically obscure things for them to be 'invisible' to the driver.
>It gets even worse. Not only can we not see though solid objects; research has shown that we tend not to look near to the edges of a framed scene. In plain language, we tend not to look at the edges of a windscreen. So, not only do the door pillars of a car represent a physical blind spot, but our eyes tend not to fixate near to it, leading to an even bigger jump, or saccade, past a door pillar. This is called windscreen zoning.
A couple of weeks ago I was driving along a steep valley with constant winding hairpin turns for over an hour, and I'd never been more aware of the fact that the pillars prevented me from seeing any oncoming traffic whatsoever when curving (extremely) left, even if I craned my neck as far as I could to the right. The pillar just blocks it all out.
It was really disturbing to drive knowing you just can't see if there's oncoming traffic or not, and if they're in their lane or drifting into yours. You just have to hope and pray everybody's staying in their (narrow) lane.
Absolutely sucks from a safety and awareness perspective. I consider myself a really responsible and careful driver, and I hated being put in such a literally blind situation.
Some manufactures keep great visibility. My Subaru has very narrow A pillars and good blind spot visibility. I can adjust my mirrors to get rid of almost all blind spots on my Impreza.
My wife (unfortunately) has a Jeep Renegade. Every time I get in it I'm surprised she doesn't get in more accidents. Never mind the A/B pillars, the C pillar is like a solid foot and a half wide: https://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/10/2016/05/2016-jeep...
If you try and back out of somewhere at an angle you're backing out 100% blind.
I too drive a plain ole 2006 Impreza with a manual transmission. Every appendage is fully engaged in driving my car.
There is a lot of concern over a lot of these auto-assist features reducing the engagement of a driver. It is a trade-off of course. An automated system with good sensors can react faster than a human driver to prevent some types of wrecks, but they do have limits. Over reliance can lead to the situation where that Tesla drove full speed into an exit ramp barrier.
Until ever street has guide rails and ever vehicle can attach to a track, truly safe autonomous vehicles are a very difficult problem and a long way off. A standard street track system would probably be cheaper honestly (and it's a solved problem).
Subaru improved the A-piller visibility a bit in recent models, I think! My '13 Crosstrek has good visibility; the '08 Forester I used to drive was much worse.
I mostly ride motorcycle. always super annoyed/amazed when I drive a car at how shit visibility is. Not only all the blind spots but also how low your vision is. I can see over most cars and can always lift up on pegs if I need to see further.
Low vision is not a problem when one actually knows how to properly drive. The problem is, tons of people don't (or don't know their cars well), and they compensate with buying SUVs although they hardly use them on terrain/situation that would require them. My bmw is already lowish as standard, and previous owner lowered it significantly, and being very low ain't a problem in the traffic at all.
Generally SUVs are the worst mix of properties you want from cars - center of gravity is too high (bad handling), rolling in case of accident is much easier to achieve, too heavy so pretty bad acceleration, more expensive maintenance (ie tyres, more oil, heavier taxation in many places etc.), more consumption because of the weight and crappy aerodynamics etc.
Those pillars are full of de-facto mandatory extra air bags. Crash safety (probability of crash survival) is more easily measured than probability of crash occurrence.
How tall are you? I'm 6'5" and don't have the issues you describe with the B pillars and I sit back pretty far.
The Model 3 ended up being a breath of fresh air for me in terms of visibility overall, it has dramatically better visibility compared to the Leaf, Accord, and Corolla I had been accustomed to driving.
I should note the Leaf has absolutely atrocious visibility and stands out as the worst I've encountered in a car.
5'10" with short legs. It's possible sitting further back w/r/t the B pillar helps 'solve' the problem. Although you should absolutely have issues with the side mirror not adjusting out far enough.
I've not driven a Leaf or current Accord or Corolla. I find the rear 3/4 visibility out of the 3 to be TERRIBLE (rear deck is too high), same for rearward visibility in the mirror (can't even see the headlights of the car behind you). However, the forward visibility is AWESOME. I love the low dash.
I’m the same height. Do you mean elevation or azimuth visibility? My Leaf is awesome for elevation as I’m not staring into the visor like I am with all other vehicles. In the Leaf, I’m looking several inches below the visor.
My biggest complaints with the Leaf are obstructions in the horizontal field of view. The A Pillars are literally A shaped triangles that are just massive obstructions and the large side mirrors protrude upward and outward further obstructing my forward view. The center rear view mirror always manages to be obstructing my view of signs or traffic lights, especially when cresting hills, and I find myself bobbing and weaving to look around it.
In the Leaf I have the seat all the way back and bottomed out as low as it goes. At that position I can see forward just fine though at some traffic lights I do have to lean forward and lookup. However at that position my shoulder is still forward of the B pillar so when look left I have an obstructed over the shoulder view. Looking right isn't much better as the rear passenger window tapers upward so I can only see up and out, not down.
If the A pillars were narrow and not triangular, the side mirrors smaller and lower, and the rear windows didn't taper up but were just horizontal then it wouldn't bother me so much. As it stands, I just find myself bobbing and weaving a lot like I'm trying to find something I dropped under the kitchen table trying to look around a dozen chair legs.
Contrast that with the Model 3 where I also have the seat mostly back and bottomed out. The low hood and high ceiling give great elevation view and the narrower A pillars and smaller lower side mirrors offer much less obstruction. That combined with the glass roof gives a very open air feel to the car.
In the Model 3 my shoulder sits behind the B pillar so when I look left the pillar is in the middle of my FOV so my left eye can look out the rear driver side window. This is how it was in the last 3 Accords I owned and my partner's Corolla. When I look right out the passenger side the low window line that's mostly horizontal affords excellent visibility out the rear passenger window over my shoulder.
In the Leaf I'm occasionally surprised by cars, something I've not experienced with any other car or even truck that I've driven.
> I have to rock my head back and forth before each lane change to make sure something's not hidden there.
Keep in mind some of your behavioral changes are associated with you becoming a more experienced driver and learning just what sort of evil can lurk in curious places. As much as my car's blind spot irks me, there's no way it's as bad the 1979 Crown Vic I learned in.
I definitely believe in lifelong learning, but I'm 38 and have easily 500,000 miles of driving under my belt, so I'm not really a novice. Others could easily have the same issue. I've found a workaround, but I can't guarantee I use it to the same effectiveness every time I drive the car, and someone new to the car (or any other car with a similar issue) could have a collision before learning such a workaround.
Seems like you're in the market for a Mercedes-Benz E400: it has no B pillar, and a reasonably sized rear window [0].
Though I guess it could always be better, for me I'd personally prefer if they shifted the the hard panel further forward, trading some sunroof for rear window.. and of course there's the drivetrain which I'm sure is not your first pick.
For now, given the current limits of structural engineering, the only hardtop cars without B pillars are coupes.
Cars in the EU have aspherical mirrors that work like this: https://i.imgur.com/rJI3UR0l.jpg . Much like a stick-on but less unsightly. These are pretty good, but they're not installed in the US due to some archaic regulation or another. The Ford system with an inset towing-style mirror is great too.
I have a set of those on a Mazda Miata and the better version built right into the tow mirrors on my truck. I love them -- much easier to see into the large blindspots on both. I really wish that they were built into more vehicles. I trust that much more than blindspot warning lights.
I was just going suggest the same. While my main daily driver is a Renault Trafic van (which has AMAZING mirrors, with a built-in blind-spot/parking mirror at the bottom as well), others don't, and adding a convex mini mirror has helped see what's in the blind spot.
As someone who learned to ride a motorbike before driving a car, I got used to needing to know where everything is around you at all times (because you pay the price, regardless of whose fault it is). I think this has helped with my driving generally, but also means I do 'lifesaver' looks before every lane change, which I sometimes get asked about.
Hmm... how about adding displays on the pillars connected to cameras that fill in the view (adjusted to whatever the driver's head position is at any time)?
My wife's Honda CR-V has a camera in the passenger side mirror and when you turn the blinkers toward the passenger side, it shows that camera on the entertainment center display. It's one of those things, that once I experienced it, i don't know why all cars don't have this. It completely eliminated the blind spot problem.
I have two Hondas with this feature and once you have it, it feels frankly unsafe to drive other cars (even with various other tricks). Once you realize how wide the angle of the camera is you basically never have to turn your head away from looking forwards.
I only wish that it also worked for the left-side mirror as well. My understanding is that Hondas new all electric cars will feature cameras instead of mirrors entirely.
I recently saw a review for a car that offers this feature for left and right mirrors. I believe it was the Polestar, Volvo's new EV brand. They're much pricier than Hondas, but hopefully they'll popularize features like this so that they become common in less expensive vehicles.
For blind spots, newer VWs have a blind spot indicator in the mirrors that light up if something is next to you. For the A pillar, the cameras would be a massive improvement in any car I've driven.
Well, you could look at the center screen in the 3 before changing lanes, but that's not a habit I have, and I'm not sure relying on a video screen that shows a computer-generated representation of an obstacle it thinks might be there is a habit I want to take up.
Isn't that the usual automaker tradeoff, though? Safety improvements for the occupants of a vehicle, even at the expense of additional hazards for those outside it.
There are obvious market reasons for it to be this way, but it seems like a failure of regulations that it is. And given this reality, it's not surprising that pedestrian fatalities are way up per TFA.
> That's a direct benefit for your own safety, though.
Only given a crash. Better visibility improves your own safety by reducing the likelihood of a crash.
Ideally, we would analyze the whole solution and only increase the pillar sizes to the point at which more increases caused net-greater morbidity and mortality rates, both for the driver and passengers, and for others outside the car.
I don't know if there is any research or not but it certainly helps me to be able to see a car doing an overtake move from my rear view mirror in the vehicle to seeing them in the side mirror all the way to where they are right beside me and I can see them without mirrors. Never is there a moment when they are not visible.
Depth perception might come into play when you are timing your own move in front of a car that is already overtaking you. I would caution against that; you already have a double light path to deal with in the mirror and you are also looking in front of you. Just stick to your lane and wait until it is obvious that you can make a move; for instance when the lane is completely clear or when there is ample space, not a space that may or may not be narrow enough to slot your car in.
I don’t need research other than the one I can do myself where it allows me to see cars in my blind spots that I can’t see otherwise.
With a normal mirror watch a car pass you and watch it disappear for a bit before it is visible in your window. The blind spot mirrors show you a car is there all the way until it is past you.
One of the reasons I am reluctant to drive anything other than a pickup truck. Visibility is just so atrocious in most vehicles, and the trend of making mirrors roughly the size of my palm for aerodynamic reasons is problematic.
I had to trade in a newer crossover with blind spot detection warning (sound and light) for an older truck. I was really worried that I would have a hard time getting used to driving without the blindspot detection, but the truck came with mirrors like this:
https://accessories.ford.com/exterior/trailer-towing/kit-rea...
Those are phenomenal... I honestly don't miss the blind spot detection / warning system at all, you can see so much.
I am assuming the downvotes are from people who can’t verify this, but it is true. The fish eye camera captures the cars in the blind spots where the side mirrors can’t see them. You can see the front of the car on your side window and still see the rear of the car in the camera.
It's VERY easy to lose a pedestrian in the A-pillar (windshield pillar) of modern cars, particularly due to how large these units have gotten to accommodate side curtain airbags.
Note that the fixtures on the body don't have to 100% optically obscure things for them to be 'invisible' to the driver.
https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-s...
>It gets even worse. Not only can we not see though solid objects; research has shown that we tend not to look near to the edges of a framed scene. In plain language, we tend not to look at the edges of a windscreen. So, not only do the door pillars of a car represent a physical blind spot, but our eyes tend not to fixate near to it, leading to an even bigger jump, or saccade, past a door pillar. This is called windscreen zoning.