News has reached the TopGear.com team – via the medium of an official press release – that the Honda e electric city car will be fitted, as standard, with actual cameras for mirrors. Rarely has such news elicited such joy in the TopGear.com office.
As per the images above, and just like on the prototype Honda e, the production car will get two very svelte cameras attached to the doors in place of the mirrors, feeding visual information to a pair of six-inch screens inside the car.
These screens sit either side of the dashboard, obviously, and offer two settings – a ‘normal’ view, and a ‘wide’ view. Pretty self-explanatory. Should you need guidance, ‘normal’ removes blind spots by about 10 per cent, and ‘wide’ takes that up to 50 per cent. Pop it in reverse, and the mirror screens give you a little help to see better.
Why camera mirrors? Honda’s official and highly technical reason is that it reduces aero drag by approximately 90 per cent. Unofficially we suspect they’re letting loose on this car.
Indeed, the prototype-spec mirrors complement the Honda e’s ‘stepless’ A-pillars, and pop-out door handles. So all the funky bits of the prototype have made it into the real car you can buy with probably real money.
Says Honda: “The e compact electric car is a bold step for the brand in terms of design and technology, and forms part of the brand’s strategy to feature electrified technology in all cars it sells in Europe by 2025.
“It will feature a competitive range of over 201km and ‘fast charge’ functionality providing 80 per cent range in just 30 minutes.”
