Cars getting loaded full of sensors and cameras brings a lot of benefits to drivers with all sorts of dramatic new safety and semi-automated driving features, even if it does mean the addition of a lot of expensive hardware that will eventually break and cost you a buttocks-load of money to fix. Still, there is at least one under-appreciated benefit to all of these new sensor systems and cameras: the death of the rear view mirror mounted to the windshield with adhesive. Adhesive-mounted rear view mirrors are one of the Great Automotive Engineering Shames, along with saggy headliners that plagued cars from the 1970s to the 1990s. I grew up surrounded by cars with these sorts of mirrors, and they would fall off more frequently than a drunk on a mechanical bull. They were awful, and they stuck around way, way longer than they should have. Let’s complain about them some more!
You know what I’m talking about, right? Chances are if you have a car, especially an American one, from the 1970s into, damn, the mid-2010s at least, it has a rear-view mirror that is mounted in place by sliding onto a little tombstone-shaped mount that is held onto the windshield via adhesives.
When they’re mounted, the effect is appealing, as it feels like the mirror is just floating there, with no obvious supports, ready to reflect whatever is going on behind you. It looks very clean and tidy. I should emphasize that I’m not certain here, but the research I was able to find seems to show the earliest patented reference to the adhesive-mounted mirror going back to 1964, and originally filed in 1958 by one J.D. Ryan:
The earliest production cars that had these types of mirrors I think were Fords, with cars like the Mustang getting them by 1968:
The inset mirror you see there is a 1967 Mustang, which clearly has an arm-type mount, and there, next to our pal Steve, you can see the adhesive-backed mirror that followed. Also in the background you can see a mid-’60s Valiant that also clearly uses an arm-type mount, and that car didn’t get the adhesive style until 1976. But it did, like so many others, end up with it.
So what’s the problem with these? Well, as I’ve alluded to and as so many people who have had these sorts of mirrors can attest, they tend to fall off. The adhesives go bad and the whole mirror assembly just drops right off without warning or fanfare. If you’re skeptical, just do a quick search for “rear view mirror glue” or “rear view mirror repair kit” and see how many different options come up. It’s a whole booming sub-industry.
Hell, even our very own Stephen Walter Gossin just recently had to deal with a variation of the rear view mirror mounting failure, where some of the adhesive stayed on but the little bracket doohicky didn’t, at least not enough of it, requiring the use of a heat gun and some razor blade skill:
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These sorts of rear view mirror repairs were only second to thumb tacking-in falling headliners on nearly all of my friend’s cars growing up. I was mercifully spared the nightmare, because the ’71 Beetle I drove in high school had a mirror mounted on a little arm, much like how my current daily driver, my Nissan Pao, has one mounted with a physical, screwed-in arm, too:
The number of times my friends would buy those little glue kits and re-mount the mirrors in their Dodge K-Cars or Buick Centurys or Ford Mavericks had to be at a rate of, oh, four or more times per summer? The summer heat seems to have been the adhesive’s biggest nemesis, as it was not uncommon for people to return to a car that had been sitting in the sun all day to find the rear view mirror lying prone and helpless on the transmission hump.
It’s not generally discussed much now, but this was a problem of epidemic proportions back in the day. Mirrors fell off like an oak’s leaves come September, on so very many cars. The auto industry had to be aware that this happened, that after a certain age, that adhesive was no longer reliable, and one good park in the sun could do it in. And, like so many other minor and yet annoying issues with how cars are built, they ignored it. Likely because mounting a mirror this was was cheaper.
I mean, think about it: adhesive mirrors could be universal for all models a company made, with no need for custom mounting brackets designed specifically for every car. All the cars had windshields with a flat-enough spot where the mirror should go, so, good enough! And if it eventually falls off, well, who cares, as long as it happens well after the warranty period.
Modern cars tend to house cameras and sensors in a little pod behind the rear-view mirror, looking out the windshield, which provides an ideal spot to physically mount the inside mirror. So, this means the cruel, unreliable tyranny of the stuck-on rear view mirror is finally coming to an end, not because carmakers suddenly decided to do something better, but because they now have to, due to unrelated reasons.
But I haven’t forgotten, and won’t forget, lest it happens again. The adhesive-backed mirrors we endured for so many decades just suck, and I couldn’t be happier to see them finally go away. Good riddance, you sloppy unreliable falling-off bastards!
Would gladly take falling mirrors over the nagging wuss crap that precludes that mounting method. That said, the only time I had one of those mirrors come off was when a naked junkie attacked me, knocking it off with her ass, but the mirror just popped off the tombstone, which stayed on the windshield. When I dropped her at the police station, I popped it right back on. I’m just glad it didn’t break the windshield—that was the third one in three years.
The 3rd naked junkie in 3 years? Your life sounds more interesting than mine.
Either you are police,
or I should be calling some.
Care to elaborate? I’m guessing the mirror falling off is not the most interesting part of this story.
THIS, SO MUCH THIS! My 1966 Thunderbird is one of the first cars to come with this type of mirror, and as much as I love the car, I am so fed up with that mirror that I’ve just accepted the Italian driving philosophy of “what’s behind you isn’t important” and given up on having a rear view mirror.
Last time I re-glued the mirror to the windshield I did a ton of research on how to prep the surface, what adhesive to use, and it still fell off DAYS later when I dared to wash the car on a summer day. Screw this type of mirror.
Timely; I got in my TJ the other day and found the mirror hanging by the power cord. I guess I’ll scrape the glue off and probably replace it with a “dumb” mirror while I’m at it.
And Volvo (Polestar) just says “who cares?”
Had one car I ended up reattaching the mirror on the windshield three times. Every summer, it seemed, for the first few years I had the car, the mirror would take a lemming leap. Luckily (I guess), the mirror itself did not crack because that car did not need seven more years of bad luck. Finally, I quit trusting glue kits available at the local auto parts store and just slathered the back of the mounting puck with JB Weld and pressed it back on the windshield, securing it with duct tape. Twenty four hours later, I pulled off the tape, slid the mirror on the mount, tightened the tension screw and never had to bother with it again.
I have used JB Weld to stick side mirror glass back onto its backing on a couple of cars, one of those I did about 10 years ago and it’s still hanging in there.
This just happened on my Eurovan and I was all Aw, fuck, I forgot this was a thing.
Scene, BMW Dealership.
Service department: “Maam, after the 32 point inspection we determined you are low on blinker fluid and rear view mirror glue.”
Customer: “What’s a rear view mirror?”
Service department: “The one you use to check your hair.”
Customer: “Oh. What’s a blinker?”
I drove many cars, most of them malaise era GM, and this never happened to me. We’ll just add this to the list of ways Torch is special.
Here we are reflecting upon the past, the things we’ve left behind.
Looking in the rear view mirror as it were, at the rear view mirror.
They really just don’t fall down that much, and they’re not very difficult to put back up. I’ve only had one fall off, and it’s stayed just fine for over a year now.
Are saggy headliners only a problem on 70s-90s cars? Has headliner technology improved at all? I’m pretty sure it just takes 25 years before it usually falls down.
My 2011 Golf says that headliner tech has definitely not improved.
Where I’m at, insurance policies estimate the lifespan of a windshield of a regular vehicle for glass coverage purposes at 1 year.
This is not something I have needed to tangle with.
“…as it was not uncommon for people to return to a car that had been sitting in the sun all day to find the rear view mirror lying prone and helpless on the transmission hump.”
Or, to have it fly off in the middle of the Carousel at Road America, and end up amidst the pedals at speed, as happened once to my Dad.
Didn’t they mirrors have to be flimsy by law… I thought it was part of a safety push in the 60’s for stuff to break away and the windshield was the most convenient place. Sorta like when cool aircraft type switches had to become boring rocker switches, I’m looking at you E-Type and MGB.
That way you wouldn’t impale yourself flying through the windshield because you were driving home drunk and had no seatbelt on after crashing a swingers party stag with your sans-a-belt slacks in your new Chrysler Cordoba.
Mine was not even included in my Mercury Tracer, I could see the trace of where it was located. I bought a mirror from amazon that has a suction cup, best purchase ever
The Japanese style mirrors mounted to the ceiling are the best! Why don’t more cars do that?
Of all the hills to die on, this one seems less important than most. The adhesives have gotten better over time; this failure is less common today.
On the flip side, I’m not really sure why mounting the mirror directly to the windshield was ever a good idea. Slightly sleeker looks, maybe?
I’ve had surprisingly few failures of those over the years, and the majority of my old clunkers have been ’70s-90s American cars. The ones that did fall off tended to keep falling off; it’s like the factory adhesive was better than any of the replacement stuff, and once that was gone it could never be properly replaced.
I wonder: Has anyone ever done a study on whether hanging dice/graduation tassels/air fresheners/garters/etc from the mirror causes the adhesive to fail more rapidly?
Anecdotal sample of one here. I can happily say that while I’ve fixed at least a dozen of these, I’ve never had one fail after the fact even though I’ve had all sorts of fuzzy dice, electrical cords, and other assorted shit hang from them for years at a time.
I would sometimes glue them back on for customers at the Chevy dealeship I worked at in the 80’s. On one of them, the customer had tried to remove the old glue themselves, WITH SAND PAPER!
The windshield was all scratched up permanently. They just wanted the mirror stuck back on anyway, so I scraped off the remaining glue with a glass scraper and glued it to the scratched up windshield.
Those scratches probably improved the adhesion of the glue.
I acquired an ’85 944 over the pandemic and the mirror fell off five or six times over the first year until I got fed up and scratched the everliving crap out of the windshield with some sandpaper. Hasn’t fallen off since, and it’s taken a few pretty heavy hits while fixing various interior bits. So highly recommend the sandpaper route if anyone else has this problem
It turns out that an unexpected benefit of having a 1975 Volvo 66 GL parts car to support one’s 1976 Volvo 66 GL driver is that this provides a thorough introduction to the many, many differences between the ’75 and the ’76 model years. So many needless, incompatible, regrettable differences…
Still, one very nice difference is that when the glue-on mirror in my ’76 fell off (because of course it did), the screw-on mirror from my ’75 worked perfectly as a replacement. The ’76 even had the proper mounting bracket for it hidden above the headliner, tapped and ready to go, because, again, of course it did…
Hate them too. However, after the one fell off our TDI I discovered that Flex Seal glue actually did a perfect job remounting it. I only tried it because it’s what I had on hand, but it did surprise me by how effective it was.
I only ever lost one, on my 95 S10. Summer heat in Los Angeles plus the 10″ sub in a standard cab mini truck did it.
I don’t know. When you really consider it for what it is, it gets the job done. It lets you use a wider range of replacement windshields and then also consider the science of an adhesive that resists extreme vibration and heat for years, even decades. It’s actually quite remarkable.
An adhesive that can deal with extremes of both high and low temps, and bind glass to metal. It is amazing they stick as well as they do.
I’ve only had one mirror fall off, and that was on a 97 SL2 a couple of years ago. ~25 years is a pretty good run for any part.
That’s something I had erased from my memory! Yep, did my share of these over the years, though I don’t remember it being quite so endemic. It might depend on how warm the climate is where you live.
Yeah, those suck. But onto a related matter. Lets say you want to suction cup something up there by the mirror. Oh say a dash cam or some other electronic thingy. Why not have USB power right there where power is already cabled up for all the sensors? Then you could use a short cable and not have 6 feet of cable hanging and a stupid cigar lighter plug taking up space.
I can’t remember who it is, but I think at least one manufacturer has finally caught on to this and implemented a power/USB connection near the rearview mirror. Wish I could recall which one specifically…
Probably not what you’re thinking but newer chinese MGs in the UK have this. Seems to be pretty convenient but what do I know, I drive an old Volvo.
It frustrates me to no end that mfgs don’t do this when they have giant blob of electronics right there! I’ve been considering adding my own USB port. The 12V is there, just disassemble a lighter plug charger and solder it in. I’ve just been too afraid of screwing up a probably $2k-3K sensor pod.
Man I would just stick the new mount next to the old glue instead of trying to clean it.
Not like its permanent anyway. It’ll only last until you get a new windshield.
user name checks out!