One significant but lesser-known part of our job here at the Autopian is, thanks to what I imagine to be a UNESCO mandate, to keep tabs on global automotive culture and trends and be a sort of early warning system for when we note a potentially destabilizing trend in automotive culture. I think we’re at a moment now where the Autopian Automotive Trend Early Warning System is sounding its warning klaxons, because there is a potentially dangerous trend looming on the horizon: the trend of No Rear Window.
We need to nip this shit in the bud, pronto.
So far, there have been at least three high-profile cars or concept cars to come out in the recent to very-recent past with designs that forego rear windows: the Polestar 4, the Tesla Cybercab, and, from what we can infer from the teaser at least, whatever new concept Jaguar is about to show us.
None of these cars have rear windows, and my fear is that they are all harbingers of a trend. A trend that – and I want to be clear about this – nobody is asking for.
As far as I’m aware, there has not been a massive uprising of people demanding freedom from the tyranny of easy and expansive rearward vision. And, it’s not like the idea of a car without a rear window is even all that new or novel; far from it. Cars have been deprived of rear windows for well over a century, and for a variety of reasons.
Now, even two of those three examples I just put up there are a bit deceptive. The VW30 prototypes (lower center) and the Tatra T87 (upper left) actually had rear windows, even if you can’t really see them. The Tatra actually had two, one on the door to the rear luggage area, which looked through another one in the firewall, which looked through those vents on the rear engine lid:
I bring this up as a way of killing any arguments that the deleted rear window is somehow necessary for some aesthetic look, because these two cars, both designed way back in the 1930s, managed to have looks that hid a rear window while still having a rear window.
Also, are we really so sure any of these cars look better without a rear window? Let’s look at the Polestar 4:
Is it really better looking without the window?
Here’s the thing about rear windows: they’re not actually legally required.  The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMSS) Number 111, Rear Visibility really just sets a lot of requirements for being able to see objects behind the car, and you don’t have to see them through rear window glass, if you don’t feel like it. It’s pretty obvious that this new batch of rear-windowless cars is planning to use cameras for rearward visibility, directly to some computer in the case of the Cybercab, or fed to some awful rear-view LCD screen for everything else.
But, surprisingly, it’s not rearward visibility that I think makes rear windows so important (though looking out a rear window is so much better than looking at a screen) but rather the experience for the people inside the car, who may not be driving. Especially those people sitting in the back.
I know cars like the Polestar 4 will (or at least can) have a glass roof, but not having a rear window can definitely made the rear of a car feel needlessly cavern-like. For an archaic example, we can look at this old Steyr 50, which actually had a small rear window, but no rear quarter windows, the result of which was the back seat passengers could likely have developed film back there, if they wanted to:
Of course, I’m sure modern cars will be better than that, but still, it’s going to feel a bit like a cave in the back of a car with a completely opaque rear. Sometimes you want to just look behind you and see the world outside, even if the car may be parked and off. The back window isn’t just for the driver’s rear visibility, it’s so that everyone in the car can look outside and see what’s going on in the world, including the 50% of the known universe that exists behind them.
After the shove-every-control-on-a-touchscreen years-long debacle that I feel we’re only now climbing our way out of, I’m realizing that we, the car-using-and-loving public, need to be very proactive and firm when it comes to significant design choices like this. We have to think about the implications of letting designers just make these capricious decisions: do we want to be in cars with no rear windows? Do we crave darkness? Do we really wish to be so separated from the outside world?
I don’t think we do; at least most of us don’t. People in back seats deserve sunlight and the possibility to see the guy driving on rims behind us, and the showers of sparks that creates, or the unexpected Renault 4 on the road behind us, or that building in the distance or the way a sunset looks; we have a right to see behind us.
Don’t let out-of-touch designers take our rear windows away. At least not without a fight.
There’s only one person who wants this, and he’s been dead for like 30 years.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/oHOopNggl3CgTsbQ4Vfg4QTpgFiRkOUNjiBK6ezIiWUFkwz2_lkLV2G3rUIZVnDqvYpWzrecUMxtaGzGt6k-x71VUig1pdxFgtQiCKw4aKJtSc9ZHfg
My uneducated guess is that it’s a combination of aerodynamics making the rear window cutout difficult to position in such a way that it’s hardly more than a mail-slot-sized gap (which is effectively worthless) plus the desire for weight savings — and shedding some glass will shed a nontrivial amount of weight.
On the weight-saving front, though, why must automakers insist on ever-more-expansive all-glass roofs? Yes, it makes for an open, airy-feeling cabin, but if gaining more range on electric cars and more fuel economy on hybrids and ICE cars, then ditch the weight of all that glass and replace it with a lighter-weight panel of steel or aluminum. And maybe, if there’s room for more than a mail-slot-size opening in the back, add back a useful rear window, which would require only a fraction of the amount of glass.
Could not agree more. It’s baffling that anyone could even come up with an idea as dumb as deleting rear windows but here we are.
JT plz stfu on this
I can think of just two good things about not having a window in a hatchback/CUV thing:
No more smash and grabs through the rear hatch window.
And one less piece of glass to break when your car is parked outside in a hailstorm.
You’re Welcome.
Somebody’s going to make a rear window that’s just an LCD screen of the rear camera. Glued where the window should be.
I can feel it.
As long as the backup camera is required to work on low contrast gravel in the dark. I don’t care. But reverse lights are only mandatory indicators and vision providers. Until the regulations are rewritten, no windows are a disaster.
and NOT vision providers. That was my point. oops. Reverse lights need to be wide and bright to provide proper display in the dark in
Best unesco joke of the week so far, certainly
Counterpoint: the heavily and happily glassed-in passenger compartments of the optimistic ’60s yielded to the thick pillars and opera window slits of the ’70s. Inflation, crime and social disruption made neoclassic lines and closed-off spaces look comforting and secure. Perceived threats from the perpetually Othered having the audacity to demand respect and have a good time, both at the apparent expense of suburban new car buyers made layers of sheet metal and padded vinyl feel cozy.
There’s something similar going on now among some of the population: there’s inflation (which seems to have let up, although the pandemic and economic countermeasures it sparked drove prices up about 20%), crime (which spiked immediately afterwards but for the most part has returned to prepandemic levels), and a host of shrieking banshees wailing about the woke and the takers and that the people who still control almost everything, including the preponderance of power and cultural discourse, are the REAL VICTIMS HERE!!!!! because occasionally someone pays attention to what someone other than them has to say. The fears of the ’70s were understandable if largely unsupportable, but, as the past twenty years have shown as they rerun the previous thirty…
Is it really any wonder that people of whatever perspective would like to close the curtains and rest? Just for a few minutes? It’s not what’s actually going on that’s the problem, but the incessant slamming of a farce’s stage set doors has kept us awake all fucking night.
The Third Space is dead. The Third Space remains dead. And we have killed it. How will we comfort ourselves murderer of all murderers? Well, we won’t even look at the former remnants of ourselves outside. Here in my fortress car, I can safely post death threats to Jaguar without acknowledging people once use to talk to each other in person!
Ask not what dystopia can do for you. Ask what you can do for dystopia!
Why is someone considered a visionary even when their vision is dystopian?
As soon as the industry bought into “software defined” it died for me.
Robot take a hike!
Without a window they can finally convince you to subscribe to the backup camera feature on your 2027 Bloatbox. Only $12.99/month with a $49.95 signup fee. $15.99/month if you don’t want ads on the screen while the car is in reverse.
Yeah, no one asked for this. Literally no one.
First they came for the manuals
and I did not speak out.
Then they came for the buttons
and I did not speak out
Then they came for the windows
and I did not speak out
Then they came for the steering wheels
and there were no actual drivers left to speak out anyway.
lol, accurate
Don’t forget further up, circular steering wheels. You know, the ones shaped like a wheel.
… Should have called it the Autopian Automotive Highly Controversial Happenings Early Warning System, AAHCHEWS. Maybe you should go through a rebrand like Jaguar.
Cameras are a poor substitute. Some of us get sick with a camera for a rear-view mirror. Depth-perception is difficult. And I’m guessing the failure rate for a mirror is many orders of magnitude less than a camera system.
Basically, the same argument for side mirrors
“Depth-perception is difficult.”
That’s why a lot of rear view camera implementations show lines or color boxes illustrating distances. Still difficult to judge distance, but they tried.
Depth perception is nigh on impossible. No focus adjustment of your eyes provides it, nor stereoscopic vision, nor does movement of your head for parallax. The only things left are diminishing size with distance and superposition. It is the same level of depth perception experienced by a person with only one working eye, if the eye also had fixed focus, and they had no head and body mobility.
I hear people say “well I can’t see anything out of the tiny rear window as it is, so why not remove it?” and my response is “how about we make the window bigger and more useful instead?” While we’re at it, make belt lines lower and give me more side and quarter panel window area. I’ll use my backup camera, but I never feel like the technology is a complete replacement for mark I eyeballs.
Definitely keep the rear window, even if it’s useless, just like the one on my Camaro.
If we end up in the world of no rear windows, we enter the world of tiny wiper to clear schmutz off the backup cameras…
We need those anyway. Plenty of vehicles have terrible visibility right behind and down low, so require a backup camera to avoid running over small children or small cars.