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Comment by josh_fyi | Hacker News Reader

These will break more often, and be expensive to fix; the result will be that lots of cars will be on the road without a rear-view.

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If the automakers manage to put the camera inside the car body, it probably would be a lot less likely to break. It might even be cheaper to fix - a rear mirror assembly has quite some moving parts and need to be painted to match the car

digital cameras have far more moving parts than a rear view mirror assembly.

How so? A fixed wide focus camera doesn't really have any moving parts at all afaik.

Any small old bump might knock a wire loose.

You'd have to have a pretty large jolt to knock a mirror off its housing or mount.

Small old bump will never "knock a wire loose". This is serious industrial level equipment that must handle rain, snow and other shitty conditions including vibrations of a wide frequency range. And all that at least for the warranty period of a vehicle.

> And all that at least for the warranty period of a vehicle.

You got me till this point, and you prove we should be cautious about such tech. I live in one of the richest cities in the world (certainly one of most expensive), and the amount of 10+ year old cars is huge. Go to country side, and they become majority, with many clocking 15+ years.

For physical mirror to fail, you need to break it or completely lose it, and then its obvious whats the situation. Electronics have more components that can fail, and as an IT guy, I know what can will eventually fail (ie how many digital cameras work flawlessly after 10 years of daily use?). Last thing I need is to have an potentially unreliable critical safety feature in the car.

If health check of such systems is included in periodic maintenance events, there shouldn't be a problem at all.

I'm also not quite sure that good old mechanical cars fail less than modern vehicles supplied with lots of complicated electronic stuff.

I used to drive an old 1979 - that car had few electronic conveniences, but left me sitting on the side of the road more than once. It had also developed a problem where it couldn't idle for more than a few minutes because the engine would stall (mixture to rich, maybe?). My current oldest car is a 2003, it has electronic fuel injection, as well as a number of other electric conveniences - remote control mirror, power seat, cd changer, etc. I've only done routine maintenance and replaced a leaking engine seal, and that car has been 100% reliable and has never left me sit.

My much newer 2007 car has a lot more electronics (more airbags, automatic breaking, adaptive cruise control), but so far, still has had no problem, but it's only 3 years old (bought in 2016), so time will tell.

There are numerous studies that show that cars nowadays are dramatically more reliable, both in when and how they fail. There are always going to be maintenance parts but I really can't imagine that cameras are getting loose wires. Besides it's literally two screws and a clip to replace these. They are cheaper to replace than mirrors.

If the electrical wiring was shoddy enough to come unstuck with a minor road bump, I'd be more concerned about the rest of the wires in the ECU messing up, over a camera. This never happens

I wish modern cars never had electrical issues.

Just like the other thousands of wires in a car? Get real...

I spent about $400 to replace a side-view mirror that had stopped working, it was no longer adjustable.

The rear-view camera on our car is 3 years old and hasn't broken yet, but it took 7 years for the side mirror to stop working on the other car, so I guess time will tell, but the camera seems much simpler (and the camera doesn't need to stick out from the car like a traditional mirror so should be less prone to accidental breakage)

remember, with a broken camera mirror, you car won't even start ;)

I'm getting juicero flashbacks

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