Rear-view "mirror" screen used when towing

[Crissa]

How can the rear view (or lack there of) with tonneau cover closed be legal? If they can require a side mirror wouldn't there be a requirement that the windshield mirror vision be unobstructed?

Don't get me wrong I love not using it but really shocked that the internal rear view mirror is seen differently than the external side mirrors.

Then panel trucks and vans wouldn't be legal to build.

-Crissa

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[HAL GALLUS]

Since you can't see out of the rear window with the Tonneau cover closed, it makes sense to have a rear-view screen instead of a rear-view mirror. And then when towing, Tesla can offer a Cybertruck accessory: a wireless camera that gets placed on the rear of whatever you're towing, and when the CT senses it's towing something, the view from the wireless camera can automatically replace the view from the CT's rear camera. I'd buy that accessory in a heartbeat.

sounds cool.

 

[carpedatum]

I currently have Ford's setup for this. It is kind of amusing to see how much dedicated hardware is involved. The results are pretty helpful, but Tesla should be able to improve upon them easily.

The Ford comes with a camera in the tailgate that points straight down at the hitch, and another that looks straight backward, just inches away. There's a third one on top of the cab, facing backward. There is also a front-facing camera and various blended views to choose from. A dedicated button on the dash puts those views on the center console, where you can choose between them.

For mucho extra dinero, you can purchase parts from Ford to implement a camera on the rear of your trailer, which just becomes another view you can choose. I added that camera, and with it a yaw sensor for the trailer as well as a TPMS receiver and a matching set of TPMS sensors.

By the time you're done with all that, you have functionality (not entirely unlike auto-park) that positions the ball under the trailer hitch for you at hook-up, shows you what is behind the trailer while towing, and lets you steer the trailer, while backing up, with a special knob on the dashboard. You also know your trailer tire pressures and temperatures while towing and you've got knowledge of your tongue weight, from the onboard scales. The headlamps adjust automatically for any squat at the rear bumper. The truck auto-detects that it may be towing something and asks you to pick a trailer profile, in which you've effectively defined how hard it needs to poke the trailer's brakes, etc. All that is very nice and I'm sure it solves for additonal safety. I have yet to back our Winnebago travel trailer into anything, at least.

However, it is mostly done with dedicated sensor hardware, trim-specific ECUs, and, sadly, wires. The first thing you do, when adding the trailer bits, is replace the legacy four-pin trailer connector on the rear bumper with a Ford-specific 12-pin design. That plugs into the factory wiring harness (under the truck bed), so every truck (at least, for certain trims) has to have all that wiring. Next, you run a cable the length of your trailer and then on to wherever you'd like to put the rear-facing camera. Another wire supports the yaw sensor, which has to be screwed or glued to the trailer tongue. A third goes back to the TPMS receiver/sending unit, which you mount underneath, somewhere near the trailer axle(s). These cables merge into a single 12-pin plug at the trailer tongue.

Hopefully Tesla has studied all this and has gone its own way. These are great features to have, but in practice:

1) I can't imagine putting all this extra crap on multiple trailiers. It was about $1500 and took hours to install. I am confident it could be made much more portable (and cheaper).

2) The camera image from the tailer's backside, when put on the center console display, is pretty low-res and suffers from wide-angle distortion. It also takes over most of the center display. Consequently, it has a very poor wife-acceptance factor, and I have to keep it turned off unless I'm making a lane change. So I have to poke a button on the dash twice, to use the thing and turn it off again, which also has a poor wife-acceptance factor. Putting it on the rear-view mirror screen, which is intended exclusively for the driver, would be a huge improvement and that can simply happen automatically.

3) Why am I getting help with backing up the trailer via a dedicated knob, when the truck could just let me tell it where I want the thing, and put there on its own?

4) Quality is an issue here. The onboard scales are wildly inaccurate and the headlight compensation actually works backwards (a bug), so towing at night is next to impossible. There are various other limitations and issues with these wiz-bang towing features. Ford really doesn't seem to care.

Definitely looking forward to seeing how Cybertruck competes on towing features. A Tesla spin on this stuff could be really great. Even better - Tesla could collaborate with some of the more forward-thinking trailer manufacturers to dramatically simplify hooking these things up, and unhooking them. Every time I do it, it stuns me that "bumper-pull" trailer hookups don't seem to have evolved much since the '50s.

 

[Crissa]

4) Quality is an issue here. The onboard scales are wildly inaccurate and the headlight compensation actually works backwards (a bug), so towing at night is next to impossible. There are various other limitations and issues with these wiz-bang towing features. Ford really doesn't seem to care.

Headlight compensation? What's that?

-Crissa

 

[Ry7104]

I have seperate camera system when I tow my 26’ travel trailer. Great work seeing behind me on the freeway and what not. It would be nice to have the system integrated rather than a different screen. Otherwise it’s a crisp 1080p over nearly 40’ away.

 

[Jsmithjr732]

I thought the recent video of the interior showed a virtual mirror on screen? Seems like a good way to solve without having a true rear view mirror screen.

 

[CyberGus]

I thought the recent video of the interior showed a virtual mirror on screen? Seems like a good way to solve without having a true rear view mirror screen.

Sure, the rearward camera can be displayed on-screen, but…

1. That’s a big chunk of screen real-estate to sacrifice, and
2. Mode confusion due to the rear view existing in different locations

I don’t see why the mirror cannot double as a display.

 

[carpedatum]

Headlight compensation? What's that?

-Crissa

Ah, maybe a poor turn of phrase on my part. It has also been described as "auto-leveling."

Some of the current F-150 trim levels have LED projector headlights. The beams aren't fixed - they can be manipulated in both azimuth and elevation electronically. It isn't much of a surprise, I guess, that these are linked to steering input. You point the truck left or right and the headlights point that way. Cool, and helpful, but car makers have been doing that for a long time now with much simpler tech. The decision to tweak the elevation angle, in addition to the azimuth, is a bit more new and potentially very interesting in a half-ton truck, if you're towing or loading it heavily.

In the traliering use-case, when I drop a few hundred extra pounds on the hitch, the truck's butt will sag a bit, and the nose will rise. A superduty won't do that much until the load gets really big, but half-ton owners who tow tailers will see this fairly frequently. Too much of this would be bad at many levels, but even a little has a deliterous effect at night, because the headlights will naturally aim a bit higher and then even low beams can bother oncoming drivers.

Ford put sensors on some trims of the F150 that can detect that case, and exploit the ability of the headlights to pivot on the elevation axis to keep the lights pointed where we want them. In theory they could help compensate for almost any weird angle that the truck happens to be sitting at, off-road or on, loaded or not, and keep the headlights pointed where they should be.

However, it seems that some of us have discovered that Ford's current implementation has, at best, a sign problem. In reality, when I make my truck's butt sag under the weight of a trailer and its nose rises a bit in resposne, Ford amplifies the problem by aiming the headlights up even higher. I noticed that months ago, but numerous threads like this one on the f150gen14 forum make it pretty clear that I'm not alone, and further that if I drag the local dealer into it, I'll probably just raise my own blood pressure.

I trust Tesla's engineers to not make a stupid error like that, or to fix it in a fortnight if they did. Won't it be fun to see what they do with Cybertruck's headlights? Some folks have hacked these F150 lights to activate an anti-glare feature that Ford apparently didn't homologate in the USA. I'm thinking we'll see some pretty cool intelligent headlight features in Cybertruck, if not immediately, then over a bit of time.

With that I formally apologize for forking the thread. Please ignore me - buying an F150 has just made me drool over Cybertruck even more, and strangely nobody on the F150 forums seems to want to hear that.

 

[carpedatum]

I thought the recent video of the interior showed a virtual mirror on screen? Seems like a good way to solve without having a true rear view mirror screen.

My own small experience suggests pros and cons. On one hand, the center display is big and you can _really_ see the details. Nice! On the other, that center display isn't just for the driver and has a lot of other tasks. If your passenger is made sad because there is a big real-time view through a backward-facing camera in their face (think nausea, or just hey-I'd-really-rather-just-see-the-album-art), then it isn't so much fun.

So hey, why not have both options? Put it on a drivrer-dedicated rearview mirror screen whenever towing, and let us put it on the center screen (or even the instrumet cluster) too, if desired?

Oh, hey, does the current CT design have an instrument cluster? I hope so. I could actually see putting that rear view there on demand, if folks don't want a rear view mirror-esq display behind the windshield.

 

[Crissa]

Ah, maybe a poor turn of phrase on my part. It has also been described as "auto-leveling."

Some of the current F-150 trim levels have LED projector headlights. The beams aren't fixed - they can be manipulated in both azimuth and elevation electronically. It isn't much of a surprise, I guess, that these are linked to steering input. You point the truck left or right and the headlights point that way. Cool, and helpful, but car makers have been doing that for a long time now with much simpler tech. The decision to tweak the elevation angle, in addition to the azimuth, is a bit more new and potentially very interesting in a half-ton truck, if you're towing or loading it heavily.

In the traliering use-case, when I drop a few hundred extra pounds on the hitch, the truck's butt will sag a bit, and the nose will rise. A superduty won't do that much until the load gets really big, but half-ton owners who tow tailers will see this fairly frequently. Too much of this would be bad at many levels, but even a little has a deliterous effect at night, because the headlights will naturally aim a bit higher and then even low beams can bother oncoming drivers.

Ford put sensors on some trims of the F150 that can detect that case, and exploit the ability of the headlights to pivot on the elevation axis to keep the lights pointed where we want them. In theory they could help compensate for almost any weird angle that the truck happens to be sitting at, off-road or on, loaded or not, and keep the headlights pointed where they should be.

However, it seems that some of us have discovered that Ford's current implementation has, at best, a sign problem. In reality, when I make my truck's butt sag under the weight of a trailer and its nose rises a bit in resposne, Ford amplifies the problem by aiming the headlights up even higher. I noticed that months ago, but numerous threads like this one on the f150gen14 forum make it pretty clear that I'm not alone, and further that if I drag the local dealer into it, I'll probably just raise my own blood pressure.

I trust Tesla's engineers to not make a stupid error like that, or to fix it in a fortnight if they did. Won't it be fun to see what they do with Cybertruck's headlights? Some folks have hacked these F150 lights to activate an anti-glare feature that Ford apparently didn't homologate in the USA. I'm thinking we'll see some pretty cool intelligent headlight features in Cybertruck, if not immediately, then over a bit of time.

With that I formally apologize for forking the thread. Please ignore me - buying an F150 has just made me drool over Cybertruck even more, and strangely nobody on the F150 forums seems to want to hear that.

Geez, with a modern truck, why wouldn't it just level the truck instead of the lamps?

-Crissa

 

[Don B.]

I'm not even sure if wireless cameras are advanced enough to provide what you're wanting. High res+traveling at 60mph+, what protocol do you expect this live feed to transfer over? Bluetooth?

There are actually lots of wireless "backup" cameras for those towing an RV. If it's a very long RV, the camera will come with a "repeater" module that's mounted in the front of the RV, and it help send along the signal to the monitor that sits on the dash. Not sure what signal protocol it uses; probable not Bluetooth. So if Tesla made one specifically to use with the CT, that would be great! As I said, when the CT sensed that camera was in use, it could replace the image on the cab's rear-view "mirror" with the image from the wireless camera on the back of the RV. High tech in action!

 

[RVAC]

I don’t see why the mirror cannot double as a display.

$$$

 

[CyberGus]

$$$

Display tech is cheap.

 

[RVAC]

Display tech is cheap.

No display tech is cheaper

fwiw I agree with your points, would have much preferred a proper digital rearview mirror.

Sure, the rearward camera can be displayed on-screen, but…

1. That’s a big chunk of screen real-estate to sacrifice, and
2. Mode confusion due to the rear view existing in different locations

 

[carpedatum]

Geez, with a modern truck, why wouldn't it just level the truck instead of the lamps?

-Crissa

I have two points to offer on that, which don't quite appose each other, I think.

On one hand, there's just the sad lack of radical suspension innovation on the part of legacy half-ton manufacturers. I was at a museum recently for a special event, and some of their exhibitions are about farming in the American southwest. Visitors can see the same basic leaf-spring-over-solid-axle design on horse-drawn wagons used over a century ago, that I see if I stick my head under the tailgate of my brand-new F150. Ford's pimped that out with continously-controlled damping in the shocks, and I understand Ram offers some airbags over independent rear suspension, but these designs just don't have the sophistication needed to solve for level when the truck is approaching its rated cargo limit. I know the CT will be better, but am eager to hear just how, and how much.

On the other, I think there's still merit in pivoting the headlight beams up and down even if the truck doesn't squat a bit under full load. Compensating for load is tough, but completely compensating for all terrain changes, from the point of view of the suspension system alone, would be even tougher. If the low beams could be aimed at a fairly consistent distance whenever the road in front of me (or under me) is rapidly changing its angle of inclination, I'd be grateful. I would be happy to see something like that on the CT, even if its stance is level with a metric ton in the bed.

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