Why aren’t car backup cameras of higher quality? You can pick a backup camera of good quality for $50 yet car companies use absolutely garbage backup cameras. Considering how we use it daily and it’s minimal cost when compared to total cost of a car it seems like a no brainer.
In: Technology
My Colorado back up cam has great quality and guide lines letting you know exactly where it is backing up.
Because the regulations called for a minimal level with specific performance requirements. No one is going to invest extra costs for Zero profit.
because a backup camera has very specific requirements like being able to function in basically all weather conditions and having zero delay.
the quality of a backup camera is basically irrelevant, once its good enough it will be doing everything it needs to do, increasing the quality wont make you park any better or see things any better.
beside this car manufacturers are trying to save money where ever they can because you may think its only a few bucks more but if you build 10 million cars like for example Toyota does per year you suddenly spend tens of millions on that one single part.
To see how cheap car manufacturers are just look at Tesla and their missing sensors like rain sensor, USS or even radar.
Tesla is trying since 2016 to replace a rain sensor that costs literal cents with a software solution that uses their camera, it never worked and is still not working 8 years later and still they wont spend the few cents on that rain sensor.
Some cars have great backup cameras. If it’s a feature that is important to you, vote with your wallet. But for a lot of people “good enough” is good enough, so manufacturers won’t bother putting in better cameras or higher resolution screens in just to be overkill.
Car components have a lot of requirements, and ruggedness is even more important than how well they work. They have to work flawlessly for a decade or more. They have to be waterproof and frostproof because they’ll be outside. They have to work when they’ve been sitting in the hot summer sun and they’re over 100 degrees, and also when it’s below zero. Cameras also have to be fast, because people like to turn the car on and immediately soak it into reverse and start going.
Reliability trumps high specs. Imagine if you had to get your camera replaced every few years because it broke?
There are almost 100 million vehicles produced every year. Regulations require a backup camera but does not specify much on the quality of the camera and screen. If car manufacturers install a nice $50 camera in each car that would cost them $5B a year. So they go to the camera manufacturers and ask them for the cheapest camera that barely meet regulations. It will be a very crappy camera and probably not very usable. But if the camera costs just $5 in bulk it would just cost them $.5B in cameras saving them $4.5B a year.
Even worse then this, they can include an option to install a $50 camera at the factory which will be integrated into the entertainment system in the car. And because you are already spending tens of thousands of dollars on the car they might set the price of this option to $100 and it will still not be noticeable on the final bill. So by using a $5 in the base model they not only save billions but they also make $50 extra in pure profits on every sale just slightly above the base model.
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