I was just wondering if anyone came up with the idea to wire the passenger mirror to move down when they put their car into reverse. I know that in the BMW's they move down. But is it possible to have the MINI do that as well. I'm just curious.

 

Anything's possible.
You'd need an interface between reverse and the mirror harness, and a small logic board to tell the motor to move down when the circuit is closed, and back up when it's open.
Haven't heard anybody do it, though.

 

I've thought about it.
The problem is that since there's no memory feature, there's also no sensor that detects the mirror position.
So an auto-down would have to be time based - and that means it would be impossible to precisely return the mirror to it's normal position afterwards.

 

Oh that is a shame, its not fair that the BMWs have it and the MINIs can't.

 

Actually, I find the auto down thing really annoying. Fortunately, I was able to turn it off in both cars that had it.

The problem is that your mirror ends up looking at the ground, so you can see curbs very close to the car. That means you can't really see where you are going through that mirror. With the mirror staying put, you can see where you are going, who's walking up or pulling out behind you, and you can estimate the position of things closer to the car like we always do. There is no way to stare at the ground and estimate what's behind you. I found myself manually raising the mirror on quite a few occasions so I could see where I was going.

It is easier to just manually lower it on command.
With that in mind, maybe a single short tap of the mirror switch while you have the car in reverse could signal a time-based lowering of the mirror, that cancels when you shift out of reverse. As Ian said, it would be rather imprecise, but you would not be using it that often, so the error would not accumulate very quickly. That or find some way of adding a tachometer to the mirror's vertical axis.

Really folks, the feature you are lusting after is not worth the trouble. In fact, you will want it to quit moving the mirror on you more often than you will want the mirror to move.

 

I read the first two post and you were the first person I thought about who could get this done. Haa