Elon Musk has hinted on Twitter that Tesla might be adding the potential to mechanically configure side mirrors for every driver, possibly leveraging the cabin camera to accomplish that.
The tweet got here in response to Twitter user James Stephenson (@ICannot_Enough) who asked the CEO directly:
“Hey, @elonmusk: will Teslas ever have the opportunity to mechanically adjust the side mirror settings for brand spanking new drivers? (based on 3D position of the driving force’s eyes + comparing against the fleet’s internal camera data & side mirror settings)”
“Yes, but side mirrors won’t be needed in a self-driving future. That said, we are going to add autoconfigure to side mirrors”, said Musk.
The Tesla CEO identified the side mirrors cause roughly 5% range reduction at highway speeds, presumably why he wants them removed in a full self-driving future.
Currently, Tesla side mirrors auto tilt, auto fold and auto dim, so automatic configuration looks as if a logical next step.
Manual adjustment of mirrors by the driving force is thought to incorporate particular weaknesses inherent to biases and comforting tendencies of the driving force who’s making the manual adjustment.
One known bias or propensity in operators in manual mirror adjustment is a bent to capture a portion of the vehicle’s side within the sight view. Because of this of this tendency, blind spots on the outer portions of the side-view mirrors are increased.
This tendency to skew the mirrors inboard creates larger blind spots in visual zones particularly relevant to creating lane changes, which may result in more accidents.
Drivers are known to forego making mirror adjustments or set the angles haphazardly attributable to the time required to set all three mirrors accurately.
This latest feature would offer a approach to quickly and reliably set mirror adjustment angles mechanically.
This news comes on the heels of Tesla releasing cloud-enabled driver profiles in update 2022.24, which allow you to carry your settings from one vehicle to a different.
