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:
View this post on Instagram
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!
Never had one fall off, but I’ve never lived in the Sahara. Never had any reason to notice how my previous mirrors were mounted, except I remember the Saab 96 was dash-mounted. Had to replace the mirror on my current 2015 Soul, but that was because the plastic dovetail bit broke. Kia had the exact same tombstone mount, the generic replacement mirror from the parts store slid right on.
Running through my head right now is the ’80s power ballad from Cinderella…”Don’t know what you got, ’til it’s gone…”
I’ve had to replace a couple of mirrors, one just a few months ago (1974 Porsche 914). Hardest part is removing the old glue residue. Ugh. Lots and lot and lots and lots of scraping. Glueing on the new mirror, once you get the area clean, isn’t such a big deal. But it’s sure a big deal when one these stupid mirrors decides it’s time to take a leap off the windshield while you’re driving (or just *about* to leave and it pulls off in your had while adjusting).
I personally experienced this one summer in the early ’90s when the mirror of my mother’s Plymouth Voyager came off in my hand when I tried to adjust it on one hot, sunny summer day.
Later, I got a 1982 Datsun 200SX for my first car, and it did have an adhesive-mounted mirror. However, the metal “foot” that it used was a much larger, about 2 x 2 inches. That one never came off.
A notable exception to the practice of glued-on mirrors was Nissan. From the 1980’s right up through at least the turn of the century, most Nissans used the same mirror, mounted to the ceiling via an arm.
I’ve experienced this multiple times. As a desert dweller with no covered parking for most of my life, it was pretty much impossible to remount the mirror if it fell off in the summer. It’s too dang hot for the glue, gotta wait until the weather changes in the fall to enjoy motoring with a rearview again. I would always keep the mirror handy so I could hold it up with my hand like a savage if needed a quick peak behind me. Now that I live in the rusty confines of the midwest, I can imagine this being a problem in the winter, but I hope to never find out.
fHave had this occur with several vehicles; 92 Chevy K1500, 71 Ford F100, etc
At first it seemed like once the factory glue job fails, subsequent reattachments using the kits only hold for 6-12 months.
Started using 2-part epoxy (gorilla glue I think) and have had better luck.
I guess I’m lucky? In 30 years of driving I’ve had exactly one of these fall off. That was three summers ago, I glued it back on with a kit from AutoZone and it’s been fine.
I’ve never had a problem with adhesive-mounted rear view mirrors falling off, but even if I did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjGXn249Fc0
What’s behind me is not important…
That mid-60s Valiant mirror had it’s own set of problems. The ball in socket attachment on all Mopars from that era never held the mirror tight enough to keep it from swiveling all over the placed as the car moved. In my 68 Charger, I have to re-adjust after every single time I accelerate or slow. I’ve owned dozens of old Mopars over the years and they all did it.
You’re gonna hate me for this, but next time you’re in a modern car with a windshield sensor array, take that shrouding off. More than likely, you’re STILL going to see an adhesive mount on the glass. The only difference is that it’s now surrounded by several other adhesive mounts for the various cameras and sensors.
I was going to say this. My Cruze had one of those plastic shrouds around the sensors. When it fell off (like most of the interior trim did) it revealed an adhesive mounted mirror.
I fixed a fair few of these when I wrenched on the side. The only positive thing I can say about that is that it initiated me into the mysteries of adhesives & the importance of proper prep for said adhesives.
if you want to really, really geek out, search for mirror adhesive over on Bob Is The Oil Guy…
I love reading BITOG threads, but I find that very rarely is there a consensus reached which makes it hard to learn much. I swear if someone started a thread about water as an oil additive there you’d find people passionately arguing both for and against.
I’ve owned 23 vehicles since the 90s, including a whole heap of crappy 80s and 90s vehicles, and never had to do this to any of them. I have done it once for a friends Foxbody Thunderbird, and that it. Yeah it’s crap, but not nearly as pervasive as JT makes it out to be, at least in the salt-addled Midwest.
I think it’s cause we soak our cars in salt, not bake them under the hot sun for 10 months 😀
The best part is finding out you’ve glued the anchor on backwards or upside-down.
2010 VW Tiguan = Stick on mirror
This article was cathartic. I just had this happen in my ’89 Firebird and since my car has t-tops, the mirror has lights in it that are wired. The adhesive failed and it fell off the windshield and started wildly swinging around by the wire.
I had the presence of mind to grab the wire’s harness and unplug it before it clubbed the windshield or my head.
I always thought that solution was elegant, simple, and easy to fix when needed. I’ve had to fix a couple but only after 10 years in the hot sun. If fixed correctly (prep is most important) it would take 5 minutes, let sit for a day to cure, reattached mirror and they would last till the car turned to rust.
In my 20 years of driving, I’ve owned (or at least had long term access to) maybe a dozen cars, all but my current daily having having these mirrors, and this has only happened to me twice. One time I can entirely forgive: my Oldsmobile was more than 40 years old at the time, and I had big fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror. Been just fine since I glued at back into place.
My Focus I’m less forgiving of. Less than 10 years old, no fuzzy dice dragging it down, and it largely detached, but never actually fell off, several hundred miles from home mid road trip. The worst was yet to come, though. While my Olds holds on to its mount with a small set screw, the Focus uses this fiendish clip that probably saves a whole second on the production line but is an absolute bastard to get apart again if one should need to do so.
Judging from the other comments, apparently I’m just insanely lucky in the highly specific regard of mirrors not falling off all that often.
I’ve owned and/or operated 5 older cars (83, 88, 89, 93, 93) including two reprehensible shitboxes I wouldn’t wish on Hermann Göring, and never experienced this issues even in a sunny state. :shrug:
I have a 2012 GT86. The mirror glass is bonded to the plastic holder. When it was about eight years old the glass fell off as the silver backing had peeled away. When I googled it I found a whole range of fixes for what seems to be a common problem. The cheapest was bonding in a new mirror glass, so I did that. Apparently the Subaru BRZ has a better mirror but I’ve never actually checked if that’s true.
Tangential related: when I worked in the US I used to get homesick, and I’d call a friend or family at random and ask them to say some words for me because the American pronunciation was making me insane. One of those words was “mirror”, which in the UK has two distinct syllables.
Well, I do like them very much for one specific reason: my towering height. Many of the modern mirrors are too low for me, and I must duck down often to see ahead between me and the mirror.
When I owned the GM vehicles in the 1980s and 1990s, I was able to remove the mirror anchor point and move it higher to the upper edge of the windscreen. This position gave me the unrestricted frontal view.
I’ve only had one car with this type of mirror mount (1990 VW Cabriolet), and when it fell off when I was bombing around on a dirt road and cracked after hitting the shifter I reattached the mount with JB Weld and put a (something like 4 inch wider) mirror from a 90s Dodge Ram on instead.
I’ve only owned Asian cars (Subaru, Toyota, Kia, Honda, Nissan, Acura) my entire life, and maybe one of them had a mirror that was glued to the windshield.
For the two years I worked for Wendy at Hutchin’s Automotive in Buffalo during the late 90’s, I sold those glue kits at least once a week. I knew exactly where in the store they were and how much with tax (not anymore!).
Interesting. Im my 38 years of driving, every vehicle I have ever owned has had this mounting style. The ONLY one that ever fell off was on my ’77 Pontiac, which was 12 years old with close to 200,000 miles. I bought the repair kit at Walmart, reglued it, and it was still attached when I sold the car a couple of years later.
Never ever had one of these fall off or even heard about one falling off due to adhesive failure until now (only ones I heard of falling off were because the mirror assembly wasn’t attached to the tombstone thingy properly after say a windshield replacement). And I grew up in Florida with 1980’s era cars that all had them. I think this is a Torchinsky phenomenon.
I had it happen to me once in LA a few years back.Black 91 Audi Quattro 20V with the original windshield. It was so hot it hurt to grab the door handles, one day I found the mirror next to the parking brake, it did the thing. Only time it has happened to me though.
That being said as a point of principle I hate adhesives, they either never adhere to what I need them to adhere to or they’re some crappy sticker that refuses to come off.
Yeah, I am inclined to agree this is a Torchie.
Counterpoint: When the mirror falls off, you can put it back exactly where you want it. I wanted mine just a touch lower than original, and that’s where it is now.
I had forgotten about these abominations, and JT brought it all back. It seems like the OE installation withstood a few good years in the L.A. sun before falling. But all aftermarket “solutions” were ephemeral at best. They were truly a curse.