Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

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

At the end of 2022, the National Standard GB15084-2022 "performance and installation requirements of indirect Vision Devices for Motor vehicles" was issued and officially implemented on July 1, 2023, when it will completely replace the old national standard issued in 2013.

The biggest highlight of the new GB is that electronic rearview mirrors can not only be installed, but also allow to replace traditional rearview mirrors.

Recently, cars with electronic rearview mirrors have emerged one after another at home and abroad. On January 9, the official of Lutes, Geely's high-end brand, announced that the ELETRE will be the first batch of cars in China to be equipped with "streaming exterior rearview mirrors" (electronic rearview mirrors).

Just a few days ago, at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the concept car jointly built by Sony and Honda was also equipped with electronic rearview mirrors, but it will start accepting preorders in the first half of 2025. At the Guangzhou Auto Show at the end of 2022, the Guangzhou Auto Ean electric supercar Hyper GT, which was unveiled for the first time, also adopted the design of electronic rearview mirror.

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

1. What kind of evolution has the automobile rearview mirror experienced?

2. What are the outstanding advantages of electronic rearview mirror compared with traditional rearview mirror?

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

1. Easy to use, but difficult to call "electronic rearview mirror", is a new type of "indirect field of view device", the scientific name is "camera-monitor system" (Camera-Monitor System, referred to as CMS).

The electronic rearview mirror consists of internal and external parts. The "electronic inner rearview mirror", also known as the "streaming media rearview mirror", is a display screen installed inside the car, while the "electronic outer rearview mirror" corresponds to the traditional automobile external rearview mirror, which is commonly known as "big ears".

Compared with the traditional rearview mirror, the electronic rearview mirror has three main advantages:

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

The electronic rearview mirror is only a camera, so its size can be reduced to 1/3 of the traditional rearview mirror, or even smaller. From the perspective of professional aerodynamics, the smaller structure means that the windward area of the whole vehicle is smaller, thus reducing the wind resistance and noise, reducing the fuel consumption of the fuel vehicle and increasing the mileage of the electric vehicle to a certain extent.

In August 2022, Musk said on social media that the exterior rearview mirror on electric vehicles would reduce the battery life 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 solution of "external camera + internal display" can greatly improve the adverse effects of natural conditions. for example, car owners are troubled by Rain Water's "difficult and miscellaneous problems", such as covering rearview mirrors, fog, lack of light at night, and so on, which are "pediatrics" in front of electronic rearview mirrors.

Third, the blind area of vision is smaller.

This is also the most intuitive advantage of electronic rearview mirror. The curvature, shape and size of the traditional optical mirror are fixed, and the field of view is limited. The electronic rearview mirror can use cameras with different angles, so the car owner can get more field of view. Especially for large commercial vehicles, the blind area of vision is often the fatal area.

Another potential advantage of electronic rearview mirrors is to provide auxiliary support for the promotion of automobile intelligence. First of all, the electronic rearview mirror enriches the content of the intelligent cockpit; second, the electronic rearview mirror can be used as a sensor for the future autopilot system.

Although the electronic rearview mirror has many advantages, it is not perfect, and there are still some limiting factors.

(1) the cost is high.

With a little thinking, you can also think that the cost of "camera + display screen" is several orders of magnitude higher than that of "mirror + shell". The above-mentioned Lutes ELETRE model costs as much as 16000 yuan for electronic rearview mirror selection. Its own "expensive" also means that the cost of maintenance is also very high. As a result, electronic rearview mirrors are now more equipped in high-end models.

(2) the requirement of stability is high.

Although cameras and display screens are very mature technologies, rearview mirrors are related to driving safety, and technical instability at any point may affect the driver's judgment, such as sudden delay or even distortion of the display screen, and frequent use of the display screen. It's also easy to cause eye fatigue. Therefore, some car owners are worried about the reliability of the electronic rearview mirror.

The electronic rearview mirror is easy to install, but the use habit may be difficult to change. after taking off the "big ears", consumers need a certain amount of time to adapt to the large display screen in the car. after all, the traditional rearview mirror has been used for 100 years.

2. From "Light" to "electricity" on January 29, 1886, the German Mannheim Patent Office approved the car patent applied for by Karl Benz, which was regarded as the birthday of modern cars, but the rearview mirror did not appear until more than 20 years later.

Dorothy Levitt, a legendary British female race car driver at the beginning of the last century, said in her book Women and cars, "female drivers should correctly place a small mirror in front of the car in order to observe the rear of the car on relatively crowded streets."

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

In 1911, at the Indy 500th Grand Prix, American engineer and race car driver Ray Harroun actually equipped his car with a mirror to replace the observer to reduce the weight of the car and eventually won the championship.

Harroun was inspired not by Women and cars, but by seeing a carriage driver using a rearview mirror, which he thought was a good idea. But in practice, due to the bumps of the track and the shaking of the mirror, Harroun said he couldn't see anything clearly, but even so, countless race car drivers followed suit.

For a time, all kinds of "rearview mirrors" pink ink boarded "cars", but they were still not widely used in the field of ordinary civil cars, because the number of cars was small and there were not many pedestrians at that time, and the demand for "rearview mirrors" was not strong. With the increasing popularity of Ford's low-cost Model T, the problem of driving safety is becoming more and more serious.

Whether it is the racing driver Dorothy Levitt, Ray Harroun, or the unknown driver, although they were the practitioners of the "rearview mirror", they are not considered to be the inventors of the rearview mirror.

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

Over the past 100 years, the automobile industry has developed greatly, and now it has entered a new development stage 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 insurmountable problems. for example, the scope of vision reaches the limit, greatly influenced by external natural factors, and so on.

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

In the late 1980s, the Eurotruck-1 truck with electronic rearview mirrors, built by Germany's AMG and Dekra, was on display in Hanover, but it was just a concept car.

In 1997, a bus equipped with electronic rearview mirrors hit the road in Brazil, which was developed by Volvo and replaced the traditional optical rearview mirrors with "camera + display". However, due to the immaturity of display technology, the "Brazilian scheme" has not become popular.

In 2008, Mercedes-Benz decided to develop an electronic rearview mirror and handed over the project to Bosch and Mecron, which took eight years to come up with a viable plan. Finally, at the 2018 Hanover Auto Show, Mercedes-Benz officially launched Actros, a truck with electronic rearview mirrors, saying it was the world's first mass-produced truck with electronic rearview mirrors.

This year, electronic rearview mirrors also appeared frequently in the field of passenger cars. Audi's pure electric model e-tron was first launched in San Francisco, USA, and the media called it the world's first model equipped with electronic rearview mirror technology. It is worth noting that China has learned a lot from Audi in the process of formulating the relevant standards, which will be mentioned later.

After Audi, Lexus ES was listed in Japan, and the electronic rearview mirror was optional. At that time, some industry insiders said that Redsace "cut off Hu" Audi, the first to achieve mass production of electronic rearview mirror.

It needs to be clear that electronic rearview mirrors have not been widely used in the industry, let alone replace traditional rearview mirrors.

3. "getting in the car" is not easy. Musk is the number one fan of electronic rearview mirrors.

Since 2011, Musk began to apply to US authorities to replace traditional rearview mirrors with electronic rearview mirrors, and even joined hands with 12 car companies, including General Motors, Toyota and Volkswagen, in 2014, but the applications were repeatedly rejected.

At that time, the electronic rearview mirror did not get legal recognition in many countries and regions, which can be said to be the number one difficulty. China's old national standard 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 worried about the traditional rearview mirror "getting off", but the European Union and Japan are relatively faster. In 2016, the European Union issued a new standard "R46" to relax the relevant requirements. During the same period, Japan also revised road traffic regulations.

In this year, China's National Automotive Standardization Technical Committee (hereinafter referred to as "SAC"), under the guidance of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, launched the research and revision of the standard. The Sub-Technical Committee of car body Accessories under the National Standards Commission (hereinafter referred to as the "vehicle attached Sub-Committee") organizes the establishment of a standard drafting working group.

In September 2016, the Automobile attached Sub-Committee organized industry-related enterprises to hold a standard pre-research meeting in Shenzhen, at which a comparative analysis was made between the latest version of R46 regulations and GB15084-2013, and a preliminary preliminary study was made on the new and revised contents of the regulations.

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

In 2017 and 2018, the vehicle attached Sub-Committee twice exchanged views with Audi on CMS technology. In particular, this time in 2018, Audi mainly exchanged the relevant design verification and type test contents of Audi equipped with CMS in Germany to provide data support for the follow-up standard formulation. Two months later, the GB15084 standard revision plan was issued by the SAC.

In June 2020, the SAC issued a draft for soliciting opinions on the new GB. When formulating the new national standard, according to the technical system of national automobile technical regulations and standards, China has equivalent adopted European R46 regulation which is suitable for the level of automobile development in our country and is more operable.

In fact, as early as when the SAC started to revise the old national standard, Cadillac had previously installed models in the Chinese passenger car market. Since then, more and more car companies have launched models with electronic rearview mirrors, including Great Wall, FAW, BAIC and other domestic car companies.

As mentioned earlier, the highlight of the new GB standard is that while allowing the electronic rearview mirror to "get on the bus", a more revolutionary point is to allow the traditional rearview mirror to "get off". Just as it is not easy for electronic rearview mirrors to "get on the bus" legally, the complete withdrawal of traditional rearview mirrors from the historical stage is by no means overnight. After all, only China has nearly 320 million cars.

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

[full text reference]

[1] "the new trend in the development of automotive hardware equipment may be popular with electronic rearview mirrors", China Automobile News

[2] "Analysis on the application prospect of virtual rearview mirror in automobile industry", Wei Wenyuan, Zhao Pengchao, Zhang Bo, Longteng

[3] "Foreign trucks have tried one after another, will the electronic mirror system be the future? Commercial vehicles

[4] "Global and Chinese Electronic rearview Mirror Industry Research report 2021-2022", Zoz Automotive Research

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: che Bai think Tank (ID:EV100_Plus), author: Qin Haiqing

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