The other day, I drove into a narrow lane off a main road. I didn’t want to reverse back out onto the busy street, so I had to do a billion-point turn (or that’s what it felt like), in order to turn my car around. And given how little space I had, it was really difficult to avoid accidentally scraping my car against the sides of the lane.
If I had a reversing camera, then my life would have been much easier. With the camera, I could have seen how close the back of my car was to the wall, and known how much space I had to reverse and to turn. There would have been much less heart-pounding guesswork involved, and I wouldn’t have had to risk bumping into things. In fact, I might even have been confident reversing back on to the main road, since with a reverse camera kit, I would have had a decent view of the traffic behind my vehicle.
This is just one of the many situations in which a camera does a job that a mirror just can’t. By mounting a camera on the back of your vehicle – on your rear bumper, or just above your numberplate – you can see things that are too close for any mirror to pick up. This makes turning and reversing in tight spots way less of a headache, since you’re not doing the whole thing practically blind. It’s true that mirrors are adequate for some things, but almost all drivers will find themselves in situations like that one some of the time – trying difficult turns or parallel parking in tight spots. It’s in these cases that a rear vision camera really makes the difference, expanding your field of vision and allowing you to judge when you have space and when you don’t.
