While I agree with you that the issue is far worse with larger vehicles, I do find that backing up in my wife's 2011 camry (without a backup camera) feels significantly less safe than I feel backing up my 2017 accord with a backup camera. I'm all for fixing the structural issue you are referring to, but I think the requirement for those cameras is sane in an age where the added cost to the manufacturer is miniscule.

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Zancarius 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have to agree. Backing up my Tundra (8' bed) feels substantially safer since I can see immediately behind the vehicle than any pre-regulation vehicle I've driven. That doesn't even account for the convenience with lining up for towing, hauling, etc. (It's no replacement for GOAL—Get Out And Look—but it definitely helps!)

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harrall 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I like it because I can see kids, no matter what vehicle I’m in.

I have unusually good spatial skills. I have parallel parked and reverse parked perfectly every single time for over 5 years…

…but no matter what, I cannot see behind my bumper. No mirror on any car points there.

	▲	jjmarr an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The law was passed due to sustained lobbying from a man, Greg Gulbransen, who ran over his child

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allenrb 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Give me a backup camera without a screen and then we’ll talk. Doubly so because once you’ve got that screen, no automaker will resist making it do other things.

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tempest_ 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My 2010 Tacoma has a 2 inch square in the rear view mirror that works wonderfully.

	▲	allenrb an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I actually like that a lot. Does the job without providing a (practical) target for infotainment. TIL.

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falcor84 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You piqued my interest. What is the alternative output for a camera without a screen?

	▲	JoeBOFH 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My old F150 had a screen in the rear view mirror. I miss that.
	▲	glaslong an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		These days I guess we could do gpt with voice out to recite a poem about the kid you're about to hit?

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nobody_r_knows 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As someone who can only afford cars that are 10+ years old, i've never owened a car with a backup camera. And in a way-- good. That part of my brain, let it continue to develop. I am much better at "feeling out" where a car is than my friends who rely on back up cameras.

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turtlebits 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, and you may as well walk around with a blindfold on to develop your "spidey" senses too.

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mosburger 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I understand your skepticism 100%, but I suspect you might change your mind if you, say, rented a car with it for a week. It's definitely a net positive for safety, and it probably costs the auto maker less than the seat belts (literally).

	▲	anticorporate 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've owned cars with backup cameras since about 2014. I still mostly back up the old fashioned way, and really only use the camera for very tight situations where a few inches matter.

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skhr0680 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Being good at driving doesn’t fix the huge blind spot you have behind your car

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jabroni_salad 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used to be ornery about this but having a camera mounted on the back of the trunk that can see all the way down both ways of the aisle is actually a huge boon when backing out of a spot. Especially if I am parked next to something that is taller than my golf, which is most vehicles.

	▲	doubled112 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is what changed my mind too. I can look side to side but I can’t see through objects. The camera and sensors have an incredibly wide view. I only have to get my rear end out a few inches to be able to see out.

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commakozzi 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

unless you're Yoda or Luke Skywalker, you're not "feeling" a 4-year old walking behind you in your blind spot.

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DerArzt 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If they are feeling it, the worst scenario has happened.

	▲	luqtas 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		like a vehicle touching a body in a speed of 3/4 km/h and the kid shouting or stepping away? or worst case your motion sensor beeping? how much the conversation diverts on a commentary about someone not wanting a car shipped with an OS capturing telemetry even of farts on the right back seat

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StopDisinfo910 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Backup camera are insanely nice. Modern cars give you things that even great awareness won't give you. The bird's eye view you get with multiple cameras is sheer magic.

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alt227 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Its not just the added cost, its the supply chain. Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before.

There was the chip shortage during covid which held car production back becasue the auto makers couldnt source their chips fast enough. I am waiting to see if the current supply issue for ram chips modules will produce a similar effect.

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ncallaway 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before.

Was there a single mass market consumer car sold in the United States in this millennium that didn’t already have processors and RAM in them?

I would be absolutely shocked if there was a single car for which the relatively recent backup camera requirement required them to introduce processors and RAM for the first time.

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ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’m pretty sure that you can buy aftermarket backup cameras. The car can be a dumb bunny, and still have a good camera.

	▲	stefanfisk 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, my 2005 beater has both CarPlay and a backup camera. Cost me $40 and an hour of labor.

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dotancohen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I believe that in some vehicles the backup camera actually runs on a separate (possibly real time, otherwise certainly heavily nice'ed) system. Tesla has a recall where they had to nice the backup camera software. The problem was if the display freezes or is delayed, then the driver is backing up and not aware that he doesn't see where he is going (he thinks that what he sees is representative of the area around the car currently).

	▲	pornel 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In Hyundai and Renault I've seen it first hand that it's a separate subsystem that works even when the infotainment is dead/unresponsive/glitchy (it's like that probably everywhere, these two are just the sample I have).

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hedgehog 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Stability control, pre-collision braking, lane departure warnings, the complexity is pretty inevitable as we improve the safety of vehicles.

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bastawhiz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Putting cameras into cars requires processors, ram, all manner of chips and compnents that a car didnt need before.

Call me old fashioned but in my opinion, processors/ram/chips/components are a good trade-off versus squished children

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nebezb 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All of that is worth the extra safety.

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Dylan16807 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Was it ever a problem to get the kind of phone SoC or camera chips you'd need for a backup camera if you were willing to pay an extra $20? I thought the issue was more specialized things. And you need one gigabyte of ram or less.

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spease 4 hours ago | parent [-]

A gigabyte!?

You shouldn’t need any dedicated RAM. A decent microcontroller should be able to handle transcoding the output from the camera to the display and provide infotainment software that talks to the CANbus or Ethernet.

And the bare minimum is probably just a camera and a display.

Even buffering a full HD frame would only require a few megabytes.

Pretty sure the law doesn’t require an electron app running a VLM (yet) that would justify anything approaching gigabytes of RAM.

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bastawhiz 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I just went on Amazon and a 1GB stick of DDR3 ram is about 30% cheaper than a 128mb stick of RAM. Why would any RAM company make tiny RAM chips when they can make standard-sized chips that work for every application that needs less?

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wizzwizz4 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your CPU's L4 cache is normally DRAM, and it's cheaper to shove some RAM into a microprocessor than to have a separate chip.

	▲	bastawhiz 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I simply refuse to believe the cost difference between a CPU with hundreds of megs of DRAM is cheap enough to be an appealing choice over the same chip with a gig of RAM. We're not talking about a disposable vape with 3kb of RAM, this is a car that needs to power a camera and sensors and satellite radio and matrix headlights or whatever. If it's got gigahertz of compute, there's no reason it's still got RAM sized for a computer from 30 years ago.

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Dylan16807 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I tried to think of a wording that wouldn't get this response, I guess I failed. Ram is generally bought in gigabytes, "1 or less" is as low as numbers go without getting overly detailed.

So what microcontroller do you have in mind that can run a 1-2 megapixel screen on internal memory? I would have guessed that a separate ram chip would be cheaper.

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wat10000 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Back in the mists of time, we used to do realtime video from camera to display with entirely analog components. Not that I'm eager to have a CRT in my dashboard, but live video from a local camera is a pretty low bar to clear.

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AngryData 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean you can buy add-on 3rd party backup cameras for like $20. They don't have any cost excuses for including backup cameras, camera sensors and display screens are literally cheaper than dirt.

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pornel 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Legacy automakers still use these for upselling trims.

It's so silly when they make some "Advanced Technology Package" with a VGA camera and a 2-inches-bigger infotainment screen that's still worse than junk from Aliexpress, and charge $3000 extra for it.

I know it's just a profit-maximizing market segmentation, but I like to imagine their Nokia-loving CEO has just seen an iPad for the first time.

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dylan604 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's great for cars built before the regulation were put into place. Without that regulation, you'd then be dependent on the end user purchasing an after market part and installing it. The vast majority of them won't. So if it is so important to have, you make it part of the car. They did not leave seat belts up to the owners to install after market versions.

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AngryData 3 hours ago | parent [-]

My point is that if a 3rd party manufacturer can produce and sell a combination screen and camera for $20 for a profit, an automotive manufacturer has no reason to complain about the "expense" of such a setup. It is even cheaper for them than a 3rd party addon supplier since they buy in larger bulk and can integrate mounts for those devices into the car, rather than trying to devise some sort of one-size-fits-all mounting system that the addon manufacturers need.

They might as well be complaining about the costs of a rear view mirror, it is nonsense from the start. If a $20 gadget breaks the bank on a $30,000 minimum vehicle, they are a shitty business to start with and we should all be clapping our hands when they go out of business.

	▲	dylan604 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The 3rd party guy isn't paying someone $40/hour to install the $20 unit. The $20 unit will not be as integrated into the car and will have the look of an after market part. Does the $20 part only come on when the car is in reverse, or is it on all the time? There's a lot of reasons the after market thing can be $20 and a lot of reasons the auto manufacturer's is not. It's not all down to greed

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TylerE 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All cars have required "chips" since OBDII was mandated in the early 90s. That ship has sailed around the world, returned to port, and sailed again.