Sunglasses, the built-in visors, and the blue-green colored glass at the top of the windshield don’t cut it when the sun is rising/setting and in the middle of your line of sight. Why haven’t manufacturers tried to solve this safety issue with a wider-reaching solution yet? Or if they have, why weren’t the proposed solutions successful?
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This is one reason why I still work north of me, my commute always has the sun on the passenger side. I may have put too much thought into the pros and cons haha
Because all of the technical solutions come with the issues of “what about when it goes wrong?”.
We could install reactive polarising systems that could darken your screen as the light hits it, but then it does the same reaction at night whenever there are headlights coming towards you, and do you really want your screen to darken when you are driving at night?
So now you try and develop an electronic solution to try and differentiate between oncoming headlights and sun rays to manage that, and the day it fails you are suddenly in a blacked out car with no visibility, at night, at 70mph. And the last thought you have is “Why didn’t I just wear sunglasses?”
In a world where sunglasses exist, why try?
We have glasses that transition darker and darker the more that sunlight hits them, eventually turning them in to full on shades. How hard could it be to coat the glass in cars with the same?
Bosch had a demo product of this at the 2020 CES. Not every prototype product gets made into a real product of course, but at least it can be done easily enough that they’re exploring it: https://www.ces.tech/Articles/2020/Bosch-Virtual-Visor.aspx
There really aren’t solutions that work better than a pair of sunglasses. System to block out the specific angle from the head to the sun have been tried, but run into numerous issues.
For example, the height of the driver and the space between the drivers eyes changes the location, size, and shape of the area that needs to be obscured. Creating a system to automatically account for all that and adjust its location on the fly as the car & sun moves is non-trivial. Further after all that you are still obscuring part of the windshield and thus visibility.
Simply tinting the entire windshield would be potentially dangerous and only offer a benefit at those specific times. More complex methods like transitions lenses for eyeglasses or some sort of angle tracking to block out a path for the driver from only wherever the sun is shining from would be expensive. A simple solution vould be to get polarized sunglasses and wear them when they’re needed
Can they solve the problem of driving-into-blinding-headlights too?
I would say, price. Imagine, i have windows in my car that are heated. Never frozeb even when the temperature is -30c /-22F. Well.. one time i had to replace my windshield, cost me nearly 2000€.
Because we’re too busy coming up with ways for your car to sense rain and have auto wipers. Apparently, people not using wipers is a bigger deal than sun in your eyes
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