I recently drove the new Porsche Macan EV, and while I’ll be writing a review on the $110,000 car soon, I just need to get something off my chest: Extending sun visors have to be standard on all cars. They just have to. The amount of bullshit that’s standard on cars these days is shocking (electric door handles, screens out the wazoo, weird capacitive buttons), and to leave out something so basic and yet important is just not OK. So please just allow me this short rant that doubles as praise for one of the unsung heroes of automotive features.
Want to see something ridiculous? Owners of absurdly expensive Porsches — vehicles with beautifully designed interiors — have no choice but to strap a cheap Amazon extender to their sun visors because Porsche, for some bizarre reason, doesn’t offer telescoping fold-down mirrors.
Look at this atrocity:
What’s worse is that the forum thread above, posted in 2021 to the Macan section of Rennlist.com, was started by a Macan owner was was using a piece of cardboard to block the sun; cardboard!:
How absurd is this? You spend an average American’s salary on a Porsche and you have to use a piece of paper to block the sun from your face?
But this isn’t just a problem on old Macans, it’s an issue on the brand new Porsche Macan EV, too. Here’s me trying to drive without the sun burning my face off:
By the way, here’s the Monroney for this Macan, which costs over $110,000!:
It’s not just me complaining about this. Back in July of 2021, car journalist Zac Palmer wrote on Autoblog “Please, just give all cars extendable sun visors.” From that article:
It’s remarkable how brand-new, clean-sheet, redesigned cars keep coming out without extendable sun visors. I know, it feels like such a small and dumb thing to be up in arms about. But that’s also what’s so frustrating. An extendable or sliding sun visor is such a small add-on to a car that can ultimately make driving significantly less stressful. But there are still so many new cars (even from luxury manufacturers!) that don’t ascribe to the extendable sun visor strategy. Is it because we don’t tell them that it’s a desired feature?
And YouTube channel The Straight Pipes has been doing a visor test for years. If a visor telescopes, it’s a pass. If it doesn’t, it’s a fail:
And look at all the posts on Reddit complaining about this very issue:
And yet, here we are in 2025, and we’ve got new $110,000+ cars coming out without such an obviously-should-be-standard feature.
I myself own a 2021 BMW i3S that cost over $57,000 new, and does it have an extending visor?
Nope. It drives me nuts. My wife’s 2017 Lexus RX350?
Yep. Lexus has its shit together. The rest of the industry needs to do the same.
Obviously, this is possibly the most first-world-problem ever, and you can easily find things that people complain about on cars across the industry, but this extremely useful and relatively cheap feature — especially on an expensive car — just isn’t excusable in my eyes. Neither is the sun.
It’s bean counters and product management/marketing at work. The bean counters want to save $5- $10 a vehicle (I’m admittedly guessing but figure it can’t be much more, even when accounting for the need for slightly more durable bushings, etc. and additional engineering costs) and the product mgmt/mkt people know that most people are very emotional when they buy a car and get excited about almost anything but the visors, could care less or simply don’t know of such a feature and tell the bean counters that their request will be granted.