Many cars come with a very cool safety feature that sometimes gets over looked. Literally, we look at it every day and 95% of the time don’t know its there! Auto-dimming mirrors -electrochromatic!
So I’m going to give a little back ground, then explain why this is a good feature to have. Driving during a dark, eerie night, on a road with no natural or man-made lighting may be fun, as long as you and your car are the only ones on that road. When an incoming vehicle approaches, its headlights turn into your eyes’ worst enemy. When it comes from the front, for brief second, everything turns black. When it comes from the rear, your vision retracts, desperately trying to battle the glare of the other vehicle’s headlights. Dimming mirrors are intended to counteract the Troxler Fading Effect. This phenomenon occurs when you try to focus your vision to a single point in space for more than 20 seconds. This will make a stimulus outside the range of sight fade away. Check out this diagram for instance.
According to studies conducted to reveal glare effects on the eyes of the drivers, the Troxler effect increases driver reaction time by up to 1.4 seconds. This means that when traveling at 60 mph, it would take the driver 123 feet to see and react to road hazards. Dimming mirrors used in the automotive industry are fitted with sensors to detect the intensity of the light. Usually, there are two sensors, one pointed at the front and the other at the rear. The interior mirror’s sensors and electronics control the dimming of both interior and exterior mirrors. When they detect a change in light intensity, they trigger an electrical charge ,applied to the glass through a low-voltage power supply. The electricity travels through an electrochromic gel in between the two electrically conductive coated pieces of glass which make up the mirror. As a result, the mirror darkens accordinly to the light detected by the sensors. Since these are automatic, the drivers hand never has to leave the steering wheel! If this features sounds good to you check out the inventory at Woody’s Automotive Group! We have hundreds of cars with this feature!! For our hours and directions click here!