Lack of a Back Viewing Window
Polestar, a Swedish electric vehicle manufacturer, has unveiled the Polestar 4, a compact SUV with no back windscreen.
Rather than installing rear-view mirrors in cars (because, seriously, who wants to do that? ), rear-view cameras are being used instead. The Swedish manufacturer went with a high-definition rearview camera so the driver could see everything going on behind them.
Even though cars in other parts of the world are doing away with side-view mirrors in favor of cameras and driver-facing screens in the vehicle’s interior—often in the name of increased aerodynamics and EV range—this omission is nonetheless striking.
The question that remains, though, is whether or not drivers actually want a window.
More Cameras
The designers of the Polestar 4 were able to improve the car’s aerodynamics by eliminating the rear windscreen and replacing it with an expanded chassis and a rear camera located on the top, as reported by Wired.
Polestar asserts that the absence of a rear windscreen contributes to more than just increased range.
For a real mirror in the past, “we’ve always had to provide an opening at the rear,” Polestar’s head of design Maximilian Missoni told Wired. The software is continually being revised and modern cameras have excellent resolution and good low-light performance, so we can keep improving the system over time.
In fact, the company is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths in its pursuit of isolation.
Alternatively, “we could remove the rear window and move the whole structure further back,” Missoni said. “It forms a protective shell.”
The designer’s logic didn’t win over everyone. What if the system crashed due to a bug in the code?
“Your touchscreen or trip computer or climate system bugging out is one thing,” reasoned Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett. “but losing the rear view out of the car — and it’s going to happen — seems bad!”
