Do You See What I (Don't) See?

My wife screamed a loud, sharp, “STOP!” I jumped immediately on the brakes, just as a phantom Chevy Tahoe emerged from nowhere and crossed our path from right to left. The driver gave me a sidelong look with a clear indication of his opinion of me. Of course, the Tahoe had been there the entire time, yet it was all but invisible to me.

Computer aided design, wind tunnel and virtual aerodynamics modeling, and NTHSA safety ratings have caused what I believe to be a minor crisis in automotive design. This rigorous process of fuel economy and safety rating maximalization dictates a generic blob, which the car companies then “style”. In the search to make their blob stand out from everyone else’s blobs, the incidental surface decoration of many cars is becoming increasingly bizarre, e.g. everything Toyota is producing currently. But this relentless march to the regulator’s tune has a secondary, and worse, effect.

More and more cars are just too damn hard to see out of. Let us list a few of the culprits, and the regulation which produces them: increased hood heights (pedestrian impact); higher beltlines (side impact); thick roof pillars (roll-over protection, airbags); steeply-raked windshields (fuel economy); massive black boxes between the rear-view mirror and the roof (active safety systems). Combine these with dirty windows from winter driving, and you are flying blind.

Let’s return to my own example. I was driving my wife’s 2017 Infiniti QX60 with our 4-week-old baby in the back when I had my near miss. Let me show you what I see from the driver’s seat:

Now, let’s run this picture through my terrible MS Paint skills:

By my reckoning, clear visibility is only about 25% of the entire view, with perhaps another 25% in total area partially obscured. Now, I am fully aware that it is my responsibility to clear the windscreen; but in a Midwest winter, the grime you see here only takes a few miles to accumulate. Infiniti gets double demerits for poor windshield wiper design in this case. 

The view out of the back of these cars is getting worse, too. When I was learning to drive 25 years ago, we were trained to put an arm around the back of the passenger seat so we could twist around and look out the back windows. This maneuver worked just fine in everything from our old Plymouth Voyager minivan to my dad’s Volvo company car.

Look at this shit:

 Federally-mandated head restraints, coupled with Infiniti’s weird oblong rear window, make it nearly impossible to see the environment around you.

But the government is here, and they are here to help, in the form of mandatory backup cameras! 

Oh.

Well, I’m glad there’s a giant warning across the top of the screen, telling me to check my surroundings for safety. Not quite sure how I’d do that, short of getting out of the car and looking around.

Does it make you feel safer to have to rely on a blind-spot alert when merging on the highway, because you can no longer look over your shoulder and see if there is a car in the lane? Is backing out of a space in a parking lot possible without a cross traffic alert system in your car?

I contend that there is little to no chance an effort will be made to address the worsening visibility in modern cars. The inexorable motive force behind the regulatory state is to remove more and more responsibility from humans and put the machines in charge. Gleeful prognostications about the coming autonomous future make this obvious. Let’s give the problem to engineers, they will be smarter than you, for technology is superior in every way to responsible human judgment.

As in so many other areas of life in our decaying republic, we cannot allow individuals to take responsibility for their actions, no, we must make the right choices for them, but still hold them accountable for the unintended consequences.