Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecky
Played with some orientations for the screens. The Insight has very little real estate on the dash, and none of them felt particularly great.
The first one doesn't block as much line-of-site as it appears in the picture, but anything that obstructs forward vision probably isn't a good idea:
The second is better, but mounting will be somewhat tricky.
The third is the one I'm favoring as it mimics stock mirror locations and obscures virtually nothing, but the screens may end up very distracting at night. At the very least I'll need to be able to turn them off. |
Given your dash layout, I think those are the 3 alternatives - in the 3rd one, if you move them out as far as you can, you would avoid light reflecting off the inside of the windshield at night; and they would be almost in the same place as the stock optical mirrors, so your habits would not have to change much.
In the 1st option, you will want to move then as close to the driver as you can, to avoid said reflection. To have them close enough together to be seen at once is good, so you only have to look in one place to see both sides of the car at once. You may need hoods to shade them from direct sunlight, and/or to block the reflection. Having the monitors close to the driver makes them much more useful to see smaller details.
The 2nd option is the weakest since you have to look at them off axis, and in an odd place; though they might avoid some of the issues with the 1st and the 3rd options.
Here's what I would do: TRY ALL THREE. Install the cameras (even just attaching the cameras to the underside of the stock mirrors and taping the monitors in place. Do you best to positively hold the monitors from falling off while you're driving - that would be dangerous and possibly break them. But try things out before you commit to hard wiring things and putting holes in your dash, etc, is going to be critical to getting things to work.
Do you have side air bags? I would say you want the video mirrors to come on automatically.