Originally Posted by
bike eagle
Here's a question about cars that I've always wondered. Why don't they all come with split sun visors that can cover the full width of the side window? They all have only one visor, and it isn't long enough to cover the full width of the side window, plus you have to flip it back and forth as the road curves. Super annoying.
I love this question, but perhaps not much for BF! But the problem has bugged me since the mid-1970's my first years as a driver. As a high-schooler / beginning University student I was less persnickety than I was later on.
Some cars have built-in solutions, and some are still in the 1950s. On the good side, I had a 1993 VW Passat (with a dumpy shovel-nose!) that had a small sunblock flap on the rear-view mirror post, and same width as the mirror. It just barely overlapped the left and right visors, to effectively prevent the bright sun from shining in at the top of the mirror.
Other cars had an extension visor which could be pulled out when the visor is in its side position and extend the side sun-blocking to cover the full side of the front seat occupants. Another had a second visor for the side, which was tinted plastic (i.e. organic glass). My current Audi A4 has extenders which let me move the entire visor to be slid backwards on its pivot post to cover the driver from side-sunlight. When I was with Visteon (spinoff of Ford Electronics) I helped write a proposal to NHTSA to take on adding a feature to all new vehicles, to improve driver vision capability. But we didn't get very far, unfortunately!
The parallel solution for a cyclist, who can wear such sunglasses while driving the car, is a pair of tinted sunglasses which wrap above and on the side of the eyeball, to block (darken) solar radiation in those irritating ways. I think we need a modular-presription-lens design which can be updated as your eyes age, or perhaps need lens implants.