Mirrors

Some things puzzle me. One thing which puzzles me is why there are two different types of mirrors on my car. And why one of them is so defective it carries a warning label etched on its surface. You know the one I mean. It says:

OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

In the first place, why doesn't the passenger side have the same kind of mirror as the driver's side? I mean, there's no warning of dangerous distortions on the driver's-side mirror. Presumably, objects in that mirror are precisely where they appear to be. In fact, I can sit in the passenger seat and steal a glance out the driver's side mirror and nothing untoward seems to happen as a result. What gives here?

And what the heck does this warning mean anyway? OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. Now in the first place, the only objects in the mirror are reflected images, and they are perfectly where they appear to be, namely, on the surface of the mirror. Now of course, these images are reflections of other more substantial objects, but they never were in my mirror or in anybody else's mirror. They aren't in the mirror on the driver's side either! No, what is going on here is that distant objects (like other cars) are giving rise to nearby objects (images in my mirror) which I use to make inferences about those distant objects (like how close they might be). These distant objects only appear to be in my mirror. I think we all agree on that.

So what are those mad motorcar designers trying to tell us? I think what they are trying to say is: OBJECTS WHICH APPEAR TO BE IN THE MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR TO BE. Well then, why don't they just say so.

The other thing that seems odd to me is this whole business about "blind spots." The mirrors on your car are designed in such a way that nearby objects (such as speeding cars) are invisible at certain points. All cars are like this. The problem, of course, is that this can be deadly if you happen to make a lane change or a turn confident in the assumption that you can trust your mirrors to tell you if there are any other cars nearby. How can we allow this? Can you imagine any other product designed in such a way that if used as designed, it can kill you. Compare: what if all television sets were designed such that if you touched a certain spot on the TV the thing would blow up, killing you instantly. Would this be acceptable? How then can we be designing cars with mirror systems that have built-in "blind spots"? You would think that after about 100 years of auto making that we would have found some solution to this problem.

So, what I want is very simple. I want a car with TWO perfectly sound mirrors. Two mirrors in which OBJECTS WHICH APPEAR TO BE IN THE MIRROR ARE JUST AS CLOSE AS THEY APPEAR TO BE. And I want these mirrors to work so that there are no deadly "blind spots" in their field of view. These simple innovations would alleviate at least two of the many things in this life which puzzle me. Is that too much to ask?