I'm going to be experimenting with printed cases for Raspberry Pi cameras (which are quite small) for my next daily and race car instead of using mirrors altogether.
I've been testing a Pi (Model B) long term as a media server and have had zero issues with it being run for more than 12 hours a day every day for the past few years, so I'm not really worried about that aspect of it; it's the little HDMI 7" monitors I bought from Ebay that have had issues, but I'm sure I can figure another way around that before long.
Image quality is quite good (
https://vimeo.com/68099584), plus you can view live on the monitor AND save the capture to a raw h.264 file (making it small) in real time; I intend on having 4 of these going and feeding a carputer with data when the time comes.
Have you considered this as an option?