In the second half of the new energy, is the rearview mirror going to "get off"?

As the driver's "third eye", the rearview mirror has been born for a hundred years and is now facing the situation of being eliminated.

At the end of 2022, the national standard number GB15084-2022 "Performance and Installation Requirements for Indirect Vision Devices for Motor Vehicles" was released, which will be officially implemented on July 1, 2023, when it will fully replace the current old national standard issued in 2013.

The biggest highlight of the new national standard is that the electronic rearview mirror can not only be installed, but also allows to replace the traditional rearview mirror.

Recently, models equipped with electronic mirrors have been announced in Japan and abroad. On January 9, Geely's high-end brand Lotus Automobile officially announced that the ELETRE model will be one of the first cars in China to be equipped with streaming "media exterior mirrors" (i.e. electronic rearview mirrors).

Just a few days ago, at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the concept car jointly created by Sony and Honda is also equipped with electronic mirrors, but the car will start accepting pre-orders in the first half of 2025. At the Guangzhou Auto Show at the end of 2022, the GAC Aion pure electric supercar Hyper GT, which debuted, also adopted an electronic rearview mirror design.

After the implementation of the new national standard, new cars equipped with electronic rearview mirrors and canceling traditional rearview mirrors will be legally on the road in China. This article attempts to answer the following questions:

1. What kind of evolution has the car rearview mirror undergone?

2. Compared with traditional rearview mirrors, what are the outstanding advantages of electronic rearview mirrors?

3. Under the wave of automotive intelligence, will the traditional rearview mirror be replaced?

1ONE

Easy to use, but hard

The so-called "electronic rearview mirror" is a new type of "indirect vision device", scientifically known as "camera-monitor system" (CMS).

Electronic rearview mirror includes two parts, inside and outside, "electronic interior rearview mirror", also known as "streaming rearview mirror", is a display screen installed in the interior of the car; The "electronic exterior mirror" corresponds to the traditional car exterior mirror, which is the common "big ear".

Compared with traditional rearview mirrors, electronic rearview mirrors have three main advantages:

First, the structure is smaller and the wind resistance is lower.

The electronic exterior mirror is just a camera, so it can be reduced to one-third the size of a conventional mirror, or even smaller. From a professional aerodynamic point of view, a smaller structure means that the windward area of the whole vehicle is smaller, thereby reducing wind resistance, reducing wind noise, and to a certain extent, reducing the fuel consumption of fuel vehicles and improving the cruising range of electric vehicles.

In August 2022, Musk said on social media that the exterior mirrors on electric vehicles will reduce the range of electric vehicles by about 5%.

Second, it is less affected by natural factors.

With the addition of technological advances such as camera display and artificial intelligence, the "external camera + internal display" solution can greatly improve the adverse effects of natural conditions, such as the "difficult diseases" such as rain-covered rearview mirrors, fogging, and lack of light at night, which are all "pediatrics" in front of electronic rearview mirrors.

Third, the blind zone of the field of vision is smaller.

This is also the most intuitive advantage of electronic rearview mirrors. Traditional optical mirrors have a fixed curvature, shape and size, and a limited field of view. The electronic rearview mirror can use cameras with different angles, so the owner can get more visibility. Especially for large commercial vehicles, blind spots are often fatal areas.

Another potential advantage of electronic rearview mirrors is to provide auxiliary support for promoting automotive intelligence. First of all, electronic rearview mirrors enrich the content of the intelligent cockpit; Second, electronic mirrors can act as sensors for future autonomous driving systems.

Although electronic rearview mirrors have many advantages, they are not perfect in themselves, and there are some limiting factors.

(1) High cost.

A little brain can also think that the cost of "camera + display screen" is orders of magnitude higher than "mirror + shell", and the aforementioned Lotus ELETRE model, its electronic rearview mirror optional cost is as high as 16,000 yuan. The "gold" itself also means that the maintenance cost is also high. Therefore, electronic mirrors are currently more equipped in high-end models.

(2) High stability requirements.

Although the camera and display screen are already very mature technology, but the rearview mirror is related to driving safety, any point of technical instability may affect the driver's judgment, such as the display screen may be suddenly delayed, or even distorted, and frequent use of the display screen, but also easy to cause eye fatigue. Therefore, some car owners have concerns about the reliability of electronic rearview mirrors.

Electronic mirrors are easy to install, and it may be difficult to change the habit of use. After the "big ears" are removed, consumers need a certain amount of time to adapt to the large display screen in the car, after all, traditional rearview mirrors have been used for 100 years.

2TWO

From "Light" to "Electricity"

On January 29, 1886, the German Patent Office in Mannheim approved Karl Benz's application for a patent for the car, which is considered the birth date of the modern automobile, but the rearview mirror did not appear until more than 20 years later.

Dorothy Levitt, a legendary British female racing driver at the beginning of the last century, wrote in her book "Women and Cars" that "female drivers should correctly place a small mirror in the front of the car in the face of a relatively crowded street so that they can observe the situation behind the car." ”

This is the first time that a driver has proposed the idea of a "rearview mirror", but it has not attracted attention.

In 1911, at the Indy 500 Grand Prix, American engineer and racing driver Ray Harroun really equipped his car with a mirror to replace the observer hand to reduce the weight of the car, and finally won the championship.

Harroun wasn't inspired by Woman and the Car, but once saw a man driving a carriage using a "rearview mirror," which he thought was a good idea. However, in practice, due to the bumps on the track and the shaking of the mirror, Harroun said that he could not see anything, but even so, countless racers followed suit.

For a time, a variety of "rearview mirrors" were inked "cars", but in the field of ordinary civilian cars, they were still not widely used, because the number of vehicles was small at that time, there were not many pedestrians, and "rearview mirrors" were not yet in strong demand. With the increasing popularity of Ford's low-cost Model T, the safety of driving has become more serious.

Neither racing drivers Dorothy Levitt, Ray Harroun, nor the unknown horse-drawn carriage driver, although they were practitioners of "rearview mirrors", are not considered to be the inventors of rearview mirrors.

In 1921, inventor Elmer Berger successfully patented the rearview mirror for a car, named it "COP-SPOTTER", and began mass production. At this point, the car rearview mirror was officially born.

In the past 100 years, the automobile industry has developed tremendously, and now it has entered a new stage of development of electrification and intelligence, during which the rearview mirror has also undergone many improvements, but its basic working principle has never changed, and there are problems that are difficult to overcome, such as the limit of the field of vision, greatly affected by external natural factors, and so on.

As a result, the "Autobots" began to explore a new generation of future-oriented rearview mirrors. According to available public information, electronic rearview mirrors first appeared in the field of commercial vehicles.

At the end of the 80s, the Eurotruck-1 truck with electronic mirrors was exhibited in Hanover, which was built by AMG and Dekra in Germany, but it was only a concept car.

In 1997, a bus equipped with electronic rearview mirrors was put on the road in Brazil, which was developed by Volvo and replaced the traditional optical rearview mirror with "camera + display", but due to the immaturity of display technology, the "Brazilian solution" was not popularized.

In 2008, Mercedes-Benz decided to develop electronic rearview mirrors, and handed over the project to Bosch and Mekron, which took eight years to come up with a viable solution. Finally, at the 2018 Hannover Motor Show, Mercedes-Benz officially launched the Actros, a truck equipped with electronic mirrors, saying that this is the world's first production truck equipped with electronic mirrors.

This year, electronic rearview mirrors also appeared frequently in the field of passenger cars. Audi's all-electric e-tron debuted in San Francisco, USA, and the media called it the world's first model equipped with electronic mirror technology. It is worth noting that in the process of formulating relevant standards, China has not "learned" from Audi, which will be mentioned later.

After Audi, Lexus ES was listed in Japan, electronic rearview mirrors were optional, at that time some insiders called Redsus "cut" Audi, the first to achieve mass production of electronic rearview mirrors.

It should be clear that electronic rearview mirrors have not been mass-applied in the whole industry, let alone replace traditional rearview mirrors.

3THREE

"Getting on the bus" is not easy

Musk is the number one fan of electronic rearview mirrors.

Since 2011, Musk has begun to apply to the relevant departments in the United States to replace the traditional rearview mirror with an electronic rearview mirror, and even in 2014 jointly "wrote" with 12 car companies such as General Motors, Toyota, and Volkswagen, but the application was repeatedly rejected.

At that time, electronic exterior mirrors were not legally recognized in many countries and regions, which can be said to be the number one difficulty. The old national standard of Continental also clearly stipulates that vehicles must be equipped with traditional rearview mirrors.

In addition to China and the United States, the European Union, Japan and other places are also concerned about the traditional rearview mirror "getting off", but the EU and Japan are relatively faster. In 2016, the European Union issued a new standard "R46" to relax the relevant requirements. At the same time, Japan also revised its road traffic laws.

In this year, China's National Automotive Standardization Technical Committee (hereinafter referred to as "the National Standards Committee"), under the guidance of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, launched the research and revision of the standard. The Body Accessories Sub-technical Committee (hereinafter referred to as the "Vehicle Attachment Subcommittee") under the National Standards Committee organized and established a standard drafting working group.

In September 2016, the Automobile Attachment Subcommittee organized industry-related enterprises to hold a standard pre-research meeting in Shenzhen, at which the latest version of R46 regulation and GB15084-2013 were compared and analyzed, and the new and modified contents of the regulation were pre-researched.

China recognizes that the old national standard GB15084-2013 can no longer meet the needs of automotive technology development. In order to standardize the healthy development of the industry and technological improvement, it is necessary to revise the standard to achieve the purpose of conforming to international standards, and at the same time standardize and improve the development of the domestic automotive indirect vision device industry, which is also conducive to the application of CMS new technology in the domestic automotive industry.

In 2017 and 2018, the Automotive Subcommittee held two exchanges with Audi on CMS technology. Especially in 2018, we mainly exchanged the relevant design verification and type test content of Audi's models equipped with CMS in Germany, and provided data support for subsequent standard formulation. Two months later, the National Standards Committee issued a revision plan for the GB15084 standard.

In June 2020, the National Standards Committee released a draft of the new national standard for comments. When formulating the new national standard, Continental adopted the European R46 regulation suitable for the development level of Continental automobiles and more operable according to the technical system of national automobile technical regulations and standards.

In fact, as early as when the National Standards Committee started to revise the old national standard, Cadillac had models that appeared in the Chinese passenger car market in the way they were previously installed. Since then, more and more car companies have launched models equipped with electronic rearview mirrors, including domestic car companies such as Great Wall, FAW, and BAIC.

As mentioned earlier, the highlight of the new national standard is that while allowing electronic rearview mirrors to "get on the car", a more revolutionary point is to allow traditional rearview mirrors to "get off". Just as it is not easy for electronic rearview mirrors to legally "get on the car", the complete withdrawal of traditional rearview mirrors from the historical stage is by no means overnight, after all, there are nearly 320 million cars in China alone.

The key to the success or failure of electronic rearview mirrors lies in the incremental market. The industry optimistically expects that with the reduction of the cost of electronic rearview mirrors and the improvement of stability, in the second half of new energy vehicles - the process of intelligence, especially in the field of commercial vehicles, more and more car companies will embrace electronic rearview mirrors to strengthen the differentiation of models, but the attitude of consumers remains to be seen.

[Full text reference]

[1] "New Trend in the Development of Automotive Hardware EquipmentElectronic Exterior Mirrors May Be on Fire", China Automotive News

[2] "Analysis on the Application Prospect of Virtual Rearview Mirrors in the Automotive Industry", Wei Wenyuan, Zhao Pengchao, Zhang Bo, Long Teng

[3] "Foreign trucks have tried successively, is the electronic mirror system the future?" , commercial vehicles

[4] "2021-2022 Global and China Electronic Rearview Mirror Industry Research Report", Zoth Automotive Research