Interesting Volvo V40 Mirrors
 

Saw a V40 wagon on the road today and noticed that the side mirrors were kind-of floating out in space. Looks like Volvo used a narrow mount to hang the mirrors off the car a good ways. In doing a google search, I think they auto fold when the car is parked.

I'm interested to hear critiques on this design. Kind of seems like a step toward motorcycle or super car mirrors. Seems like a lot of air would be able to pass between the body and mirror body but I'm no expert so I open the topic of discussion...

http://www.blogcdn.com/de.autoblog.c...1339049639.jpg

http://www.chippero.info/img/volvo/1.jpeg

Thanks,

You can actually find a mirror wind tunnel study on the internet which I remember to be volvos. Basicly further the mirrors are from the a pillar corner the better up to certain point where mirror leg frontal area eats the fuel consumption benefits, but also makes car too "wide"

http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/...ext/143193.pdf

Also you should notice that mirror is hanging lower than the hood so they cleverly direct most of hood airflow over the mirror ;).

Volvo had this design on my V50 as well.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...r_20100613.jpg

Quite noisy, so I doubt it did the aerodynamics much good.

VGs on the A pillar and around the mirror housings helped notably.

It doesn't look all that remarkable to me. It sits directly off that triangular plate it mounts to.

If they were mounted on the fender tops and visible through the windshield, or cantilevered of the tops of the windshield posts like new buses and fire trucks ; then I would think they were more remarkable—OTOH, that raised back-of-the-hood contour that Vekke pointed out may be the thing. The mirrors are above the bottom of the side windows but below the hood line. Pretty smart if it works. The V70 doesn't have the raised hood. The concave channel that runs back from the headlight may also channel-ize the air to escort it past the mirror, too. Or maybe I'm just seeing things.

Volvo ECC mirrors
 

Here's a link to the 1992 Volvo ECC,Cd 0.22.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Volv...F%3B1500%3B938You can see the lineage of today's mirrors which are inferior to 1992.
Volvo is borrowing a page from Subaru's 1986 XT.
So is Cadillac,Chevy,Buick,Mercedes-Benz,Tesla,Honda,Lexus,BMW,.............

Thanks for the insight guys. I did notice the hood line in the pics too and thought it was interesting. The mirror itself does look pretty huge but I thought the small frontal area mount was interesting along with how far off the body the mirror housing actually is. Other than the size of the mirror, the design looks identical to the 86 Subaru the Aerohead mentioned.

Compared to the logs hanging off the sides of my Focus, I thought the Volvo design was a step in the right direction; wanting to motorcycle mirrors but not quite getting there. Whether that short coming is due to stylistic needs or budgetary or something else, I can't say. I just thought they look better than a lot of other mirrors on other cars.

One of the main reasons to raise the hoodline in the Volvo is pedestrian head collision tests requirements.

IIRC the Volvo ECC was a design concept that used a small turbine for continuous power generation.

<researches>

Yup. Modest generator capacity, but bigger peaks available as necessary.

Ouch, acceleration 0-60 was 20+ seconds. Helllooooo, Diesel Chevette!

How about these?

Spotted them here:
Phormula - Engine Knock, Detonation and Pre-Ignition Detection and Monitoring Systems

No A-pillar interference on this one (no A-pillars).

I'd like their low drag mirrors but wouldn't want to deal with their high down force spoilers lol.