Vehicle rearview mirrors have transformed into complex vision systems jammed with electronics and consumer safety features. Magna Mirrors is a global leader in the innovation and production of full mirror systems. Continuing just-auto/QUBE’s series of interviews with tier one component suppliers, we caught up with Keith Foote, Vice President of Engineering at Magna Mirrors of America about the auto-dimming, feature-packed exterior mirrors and mirrorless cars.
Over the past few years, the standard rearview mirror has been transformed into a high tech hub of auto electronics. To what extent is there a trend in North America toward higher featured mirrors?
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When talking about mirrors I usually say it’s important to remember that they do more than just provide rear vision. They really occupy good real estate on the vehicle and we want to take advantage of that by using that location to put safety and convenience features. If you look at the outside mirror for example, it’s located in the furthest-most outward part of the vehicle. So it’s good for cameras, sensors and lighting. The best way for me to demonstrate is to talk about a mirror that we just launched here in North America for an OEM that has six different lighting features on it. That’s pretty dramatic. Just to walk through some of those, it has a logo light …
We have seen logo lights on certain models in Europe. Sounds like a trend?
Yes and it’s growing. Basically, you project an image on the ground as you hit your key fob. This particular case that I’m talking with this OEM, it was their customer logo. That whole logo light technology has evolved. We started out with a 2D version, we’ve done 3D, we’re working on colour versions, we’re working on larger logos, we’re even working on animated logos. So there’s a lot more opportunity in that particular technology and we’re selling that right now to at least four different customers. We expect that to continue.
Also, this was a truck mirror, so it had a forward-facing spotlight, a rear-facing spotlight and a running light, so those are additional lighting features, and then add our line zone indicator and the turn signal, which are more standard lighting features. So, you get the idea that there are a lot of lighting features that can go on these mirrors and we take advantage of the location that we have on the vehicle. It’s really an ideal spot to put a supplement or an auxiliary light on the vehicle.
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By GlobalDataJust playing up on the features a little bit more, that same mirror has in total 14 electronic features in it. It also had a camera for the surround view. We also had a sensor for sensing the air temperature which is something that’s been coming around recently. It had three actuators for power folding, power glass and power extending the mirror. So again, all in all, 14 unique features, and so it’s definitely the trend that we see, putting more and more features into the mirrors. Again, I can’t emphasise enough that the location is really key to the features.
On the inside mirror, it’s a similar thing. There’s a little bit less content going into there right now, but there is an opportunity for more. If you think about the inside mirror being centrally located in the vehicle, it’s in the driver’s line of sight so it’s good for things like displays and HMI buttons and microphones for hands-free, and more recently even imagers for cabin monitoring. There’s quite a bit of movement in that area and that’s something we start to see in the future, is more monitoring not only the driver and for driver distraction but also the occupants in the vehicle as well, and the mirror’s a good spot to put imagers and sensors for that.
It sounds like outside mirrors packed with 14 electronic features presents some packaging challenges. What’s happening there?
You need more packaging space for more features. The example I gave you was a truck mirror so you had a fair amount of packaging space, although I will say there was a struggle to get all these features into a mirror still. These features are driving larger mirrors, there’s no question. The more lights and more actuators and the more different features you put into the mirror, generally the larger it will be getting.
That’s the downside of putting all the features in. I didn’t mention earlier, I said that mirrors are more than just rear vision, they also are a significant styling cue on the vehicle as well, so the studio that the customer is starting to do spends a lot of time trying to make the mirrors look appealing, and that can sometimes go in a counter-direction to you trying to package all these features in. It represents a development challenge in a lot of cases for us to try to package these features into a space that has to look nice as well.
The auto-dimming mirror market has shown phenomenal growth over the past decade. Has it reached a plateau? What are the prospects for this application in emerging markets?
Yes, I’ve got the global picture and can comment on that. Looking at the global numbers that we have, and to some extent you’re right, we’ve reached a saturation point to some extent in Europe and North America, but we still see a fair amount of growth in Asia Pacific. Our estimation is about 30 per cent of inside mirrors have electrochromic and less than 15 per cent, maybe closer to 12 per cent of outside mirrors have electrochromic, so that’s not a lot. There are certainly opportunities there to grow, but a lot depends on the feature content of the vehicle as well. We see a lot of value in electrochromic mirrors for reducing glare.
How is the Chinese auto-dimming mirror market shaping up?
Actually, China is part of that growth story as well. We’ve been shipping more EC mirrors to China than we have in the past. There’s still quite a bit of growth in China as well.
While auto-dimming rearview mirrors have their obvious benefits, they are still expensive. Are there an alternative, cheaper technologies available?
I think it’s a value proposition. I think for what you get for the price it’s the best value. If you look at the inside mirror, for example, your alternative is to have that prism type mirror where you have the tab hanging down and you have to manually flip it back and forth, that’s really the competition there. Outside mirrors, we’ve tried things like blue glass and different types of coatings to try to minimize the glare. I think from a value standpoint, electrochromic is still the best option available.
Looking a little bit further out, there is a lot of talk about the autonomous car. In what ways can Magna support a Level 4 car?
From my point of view, we are the mirror group, and Magna’s got a lot going on with autonomous. I don’t know if I can really comment on everything that we have going from the autonomous standpoint. I can speak to how the mirror plays a part in that, and it goes back to what I was saying earlier with the location. If you talk about a mirror being a good location for cameras and sensors, and that’s really what autonomous, as we evolve in the autonomous vehicle that’s really what the outside mirror structure would become. We call it a sensor hub, you could put, whether it be radar, Lidar, just basic imagers you could put in this arm, this sensor hub, and then those features would still coexist with things like turn signals, GIs, maybe heaters or power folds or things like that.
That’s kind of how we see the evolution of the mirror going, and that’s kind of why I was saying it’s more than just a rear vision device. It’s also got a good location on the vehicle and it can mesh well with some of the future technology trends, whether it be mirrorless vehicles or autonomous.
We have seen legislation in Japan making mirrorless cars street-legal. From your own perspective in North America, what do you see there with mirrorless cars?
We have done a fair amount of homework on it. Our projections for mirrorless vehicles are pretty similar to what IHS has put out there. We’re looking at maybe a 0.5 per cent of vehicles by 2025 and maybe 1 per cent by 2030, which is not a lot.
The two most common ones that are out there in the marketplace now, the Lexus and the Audi, those are very low volume applications of CMS. CMS is what we call mirrorless vehicles – camera monitor system. We see a very slow transition. Part of it you’ve touched on is the regulatory environment. It’s only legal right now in Japan and in Europe, and even in Europe, it’s a rigorous approval process to get it into the market, even though it is legal you still have to get approval.
That’s one area that’s impeding the progress, but then there are also still some issues. It’s like with many things – there are advantages and disadvantages. Obviously, the advantages are you get the benefit of aerodynamic drag and you get a larger field of view, but on the downside, you still have to carry the cost, you’re looking at as much as 5x what a conventional mirror costs today, and a consumer may not be willing to pay that. You’ve got some performance issues that we still have to improve upon, things like you’re looking at a 2D image so depth perception can be an issue, trying to judge vehicle distances.
I guess it will take drivers a little time to get used to looking at a screen instead of a rearview mirror though …
Yes, it can be a little uncomforting. We’ve had vehicles with camera monitor systems, demo vehicles, we’ve had them for over a decade here, so we’ve been driving with these things for a while. Personally, I’m used to driving with them, but anytime we introduce a new person into them they’re like, ‘I don’t feel comfortable with this.’ At first it’s difficult to judge distances, you don’t feel comfortable making lane changes because you really can’t judge very well. There’s no depth perception or depth in the image so it can be a little bit challenging at times. But over time eventually you get used to it. The image quality at night-time is not the best yet, we still are working on improving that.
Probably one of the biggest issues still is the cleanliness of the camera. You get a little bit of a speck on your outside mirror today, you’ve still got a pretty large piece of glass that you can look in and navigate and still see. If you get a speck on your camera lens you could potentially lose all your vision. If you have a vehicle today with the back-up cameras, and I’ve got that on my vehicle, and I’d say in the winter months here in northern US there’s probably a good portion of the day in the winter that I can’t even see out of my back-up camera without having to get out of the car and go back there and clean it, with the snow and the salt and whatever. These are issues that I think over time we’ll come up with acceptable solutions.
The other part of this is just general user acceptance, getting all the demographics and all the different aged drivers to be used to looking at a display versus a mirror.
And Magna has the expertise in-house?
Yes, exactly, and that’s to our benefit. The simplest analogy I can give is, what a camera monitor system is basically a really low profile outside mirror where you take the reflective glass away and put a camera in its place. Nearly all the other features that we put in outside mirrors today still exist in this camera wing there, the turn signals… If you look at the Lexus and the Audi systems that are in the market now, they have ground illumination, they have power fold actuators, they have turn signals, they have heaters, so you’re basically saying: ‘I’m removing my glass and putting a camera in its spot.’ That’s a simplified version of what’s happening, so the mirrors are not really going away, they’re just evolving, is another way to say it.
The thing to remember with the mirrorless vehicles is that Magna is really well-positioned because of our expertise in both mirrors and cameras, so we’re not afraid of that transition by any means, it’s actually good for our business.
We are hearing a lot about shared mobility. Does that trend have implications for mirrors at all? e.g. biometric authentication systems for in-car payment and the autonomous driving space.
That’s a really good question. I think what you said with the authentication, we do have some activity in that area where you’d want to recognise the person that’s in the vehicle for payment or settings or whatever. I think there’s an opportunity there. I would say the correlation isn’t real strong to our business.
We have seen dimmable windows in aircraft yet automotive applications are still rare. What do you see happening there? Is it an area that Magna is working on?
Well, yes, the problem right now is kind of the technology. There’s a limitation with size. There’s a certain size of electrochromic mirror that we can make, and the window is significantly larger than that. That’s part of the reason why we haven’t ventured into that space. The aircraft windows are smaller, they’re more in line with what you would have in a conventional mirror size. I think it’s really finding… I don’t know if there’s a big market need for that, quite frankly, but I don’t know if there’s an optimal technology on the market right now that would be well-suited for that.
