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.
Just had a Mazda CX-5 as a rental, and had the same issue. It was VERY VERY annoying. I wasn’t aware that telescoping visors weren’t a given these days.
Definitely a must have on any new car purchase going forward.
My FJ doesn’t have extendable visors but it does have 4 visors so that works for me.
$110,000?! For their smallest SUV?
I don’t even care if that’s with options, or the lack of an extendable sun visor, that just ridiculous.
This amuses me because I had to remove the sun visors from my Miata entirely so that I could, y’know…see.
Same. Visor delete was my first mod. You can even get blank plates for the holes. Mazda tried to address this by having the visor fold in half the long way, but if you’re anything above average height, even that little bit of obstruction is a problem.
First world problems…
This appears to be the modern version of Ze Germans telling us we didn’t need useful cup holders.
Finally, I feel heard!!!! I have been griping about this in my Audi S3 and my parents Audi SQ5. Even went as far as getting one of those crap visor extenders. Such a PITA
My 500e is probably the worst example of this I’ve owned. The visor is so small that the only way it’s going to block light when you use it on the side window is if you’re sitting *inside* the steering wheel.
I don’t think any of my current cars have sliding visors, but most of them are big enough to still be useful at least.
How far back to extending sun visors go? My 1980 Corvette has one on the drivers side. The visor is tiny but the sliding feature makes it much more functional.
I recently had a VW Tiguan as a rental. The driver side visor extended but the passenger did not. And even without a passenger, sometimes the sun is in juuust the right spot that it’d be useful.
My Mercedes Metris cargo van simply has visors that are long enough to cover the whole window without needed to be extended. Also a simple solution.
I’d guess that there’s a lot of older cars that didn’t have sliding visors but the design allowed for the visors to be as long as needed. But new cars have all the cameras and sensors and shit in the middle of the windscreen, so visors have to be shorter and now don’t cover the side window.
That’s a good point I hadn’t considered. The van is a 2017 and the most advanced thing it has are blind spot detectors. Doesn’t have radar cruise, or rain sensing, or anything of the like. I always forgot about the recent tech advances since I rarely drive a car with them.
FYI: In the photos, you are wearing your sun visor. Just tilt your cap so that the brim does the job for you.
That said, I was thrilled that my ’89 SHO had dual visors on each side, so when I entered the highway cloverleaf on-ramp during my morning commute, I could put them both in place and not have to swing the sun visor as I went around.
Our Mazda Miata RF doesn’t have extendable sun visors either, but it’s a convertible (of sorts), so I give it a pass.
Just move to Pittsburgh, there is no visible sun during the months the sun is low in the sky.
The average American’s salary is 63K so it is almost 2 times. the salary
I think this was in reference to the 2021 Macan, which is more in the ballpark. Confused me at first as well, though.
The solution is to always be driving off into the sunset.
Those are only available with a subscription.
This is one of my gripes about my GR86. The visors are too small to cover the side window and don’t telescope. Working on a way to solve that now.
The Tesla Model Y, however, has fantastic visors. Good size and they slide on the support rail. Also held in place with magnets which are much easier to use than a clip. Whoever designed those deserves a raise, but I’m sure the MuskOx probably fired them already.
Except on the Tesla, when extended, it reveals a hidden swaztika to the outside world, while the driver in non the wiser.
We’ve also known this was a thing for a long time. Not sure when they started appearing, but even my 1989 Chevrolet Suburban had visor extenders that slid out from the main visor (my favorite visor extension style). My 2021 BMW? No visor extension.
I can’t remember which car of mine it was, I wanna say my S10, but it had big ol main visors, with a piece of plastic that slid out for another 6″ or so of coverage, plus they extended, and there was also another visor tucked up above that one, so you could cover the side and the front at the same time. On top of that there was a small visor above the rear view mirror to cover the gap between the mirror and the headliner (although modern sensor pods have negated the need for this one specifically). And it had a crotch vent too! Who knew if you wanted real luxury you’d have to go to a 30 year old GM product.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/ZBoAAOSw7Fpi7usp/s-l400.jpg
I’ve never had extendable sun visors and I’ve never wanted them.
However nearly all of my cars have been nice low coupes with nice low roofs rather than SUVs you could wear a crown in. Plus living in the UK our roads are a mess so you’re never going in the same direction for very long.
My Elise didn’t even have sun visors, and the ones in my Europa can’t fold out of the way, which is worse. There are traffic lights I can only see if I lean forwards far enough to put my chin on the steering wheel.
One of the convertibles had sun visors that rotated in to the middle of the car, not to the side window (MR2? MX5? Can’t remember) which was rubbish. But you can’t really complain about inadequate shade in a car with no roof.
It’s a VW, what did you expect?
My 2010 Sportwagen has them
Our S5 has extending visors, and the Q7 has extending visors with the bonus visor above that one for full front/side coverage.
My $20k Cruze had that back in 2011. But only for the driver. If GM saw fit to include it on a built to a price compact car, it darn well can be included on a price is not too big a deal 2025 Porsche.
My 2014 grand Cherokee had an extending visor. If FCA could do it then everyone should be able to.
Current gen Mazdas have a half-assed solution where you can extend a little square of plastic out from the main visor body.
It’s much smaller, in both dimensions, than the visor itself, so it’s hard to get it to cover the sun (its only job) unless you sit juuuust right.
How fucking hard can it be to make the whole thing telescope??
Buick did that with the LeSabre in the 1990’s. They also had an auxiliary sun visor that only flipped down when the main one was blocking the side window. I miss that feature!
How to camera-based driver assistance systems deal with glare? Does the camera have a sun visor??
They drive in to things.
This is part of the reason camera-based driver assistance systems are not enough. Lidar is ideal, as it can also see through fog/rain/snow and has an exceptional sensing range.
Camera-based driver assistance system sunglasses, obvs
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.