As for the rear view mirror hinges: what on earth did you think they were there for, if not for saving your mirrors when they get whacked?!
(A somewhat common optional extra for cars is folding rear view mirrors. Some probably fold away automatically, I'm sure; mine make you press a button first. But my car is old. I bet the automatic folding is more common these days; modern wing mirrors often have integrated indicators, and that's going to increase the cost of replacement.
(Sole purpose of the folding feature? Saving your car's wing mirrors from getting hit when you park on a narrow street.)
> (Sole purpose of the folding feature? Saving your car's wing mirrors from getting hit when you park on a narrow street.)
Sure, because you folded them in after you parked.
My car has crumple zones and airbags, too, but that doesn't mean I want to use them. If you've struck something, then while some mitigation of the damage is great, well.. you struck something.
Where I currently live, in the US, if you hit something with your car, you've had a car accident. Avoiding accidents is a very high priority for most people, even if they're low-damage, survivable accidents. If I tap someone's bumper or mirror, even if there's no visible mark at all, I have to be prepared to furnish my insurance information and get theirs, and even if there are no monetary costs to my insurance company, my rates are probably going to rise.
In places where lane widths are very low, hitting things or people with your car can turn into something that's a regular occurrence, such that if a year went by without any bump or scrape you'd find it remarkable.
In any case, my original point was that an environment in which cars, trucks, and vans are passing with an average foot clearance is going to be an environment in which collisions happen frequently. A related point made elsewhere in this thread is that a follow-on problem to additional collisions will be that narrower lanes will no longer allow traffic to proceed around the scene of some minor collision where the parties are arguing over whose fault it was and waiting for the police to sort it out.
Those are de-jure numbers. Add 50% to get de-facto numbers. So yeah, 50 MPH is normal for residential. The highways marked 65 MPH are actually 100 MPH.
Speed limits suffer from a NIMBY problem. Everybody wants to the limit to be 5 MPH around their own home, but 125 MPH when traveling elsewhere. The locals control the limits. The same goes for speed bumps, often loved by the locals but hated by everybody else.
I thought the hinges are there to be able to adjust the mirror to the driver's eye position. If you move the seat forward or your upper body is longer the angle at which you look at the mirror changes.
For automatic-type mirrors, no. That sort of mirror has a hinge to let the mirror rotate forwards and backwards on one axis. This is there to fold the mirror in, and to help absorb whacks. The mirror angle itself is adjusted by a separate, finer mechanism inside the unit.
For manual-type mirrors the same joint - some kind of ball-and-socket affair, I imagine? - performs both functions. The joint has a much wider range of movement than you'd expect if it were just for catering for the position of the driver's head.
As for the rear view mirror hinges: what on earth did you think they were there for, if not for saving your mirrors when they get whacked?!
(A somewhat common optional extra for cars is folding rear view mirrors. Some probably fold away automatically, I'm sure; mine make you press a button first. But my car is old. I bet the automatic folding is more common these days; modern wing mirrors often have integrated indicators, and that's going to increase the cost of replacement.
(Sole purpose of the folding feature? Saving your car's wing mirrors from getting hit when you park on a narrow street.)