Autoblog

We've all done it; you're halfway through a lane change and suddenly a horn sounds and snaps you to reality. Whether you failed to check your blind spot adequately, or just plain oblivious, Ford's introducing a two features to help you out. The Blind Spot Mirror and Cross Traffic Alert with Blind Spot Monitoring System will arrive in 2009, and one offers a low-tech solution, while the other appears to be a Volvo feature trickling down.

Elegantly simple, the Blind Spot Mirror cleverly integrates a convex mirror into the regular mirror glass, much like the generations-old side-reducing mirrors available in other markets with a concave area to aid in viewing blind spots. The Cross-Traffic alert system uses radar to monitor traffic perpendicular to the back end when reversing. During forward travel, the radar system is used to detect and warn of vehicles traveling in your blind spot. The radar tricks sound to us like Ford leveraging Volvo's BLIS system, that monitors blind spots and lights a pilot LED when there's a vehicle there, and we worry that it will make drivers even less attentive, but then, we realize nobody is paying attention now, so if this rig raises awareness, road safety should improve. Ford's planning on bundling these new safety features along with reverse sensing and rearview cameras to create a more comprehensive portfolio of electronic safety aids in response to customers indicating a desire for better mirrors and safety systems. Press release after the jump

[Source:Ford]

With all the, uh, creative uses of automotive LCDs at CES, we were were starting to think there might not be any useful purpose for the things. But automotive supplier Magna has found at least two good uses for them with their ReversAid camera system. In one variation, putting the car in reverse activates the rearview camera with the image appearing in an LCD screen behind the glass in your rearview mirror. Drivers don't have to look at awkward spots on their dashboards, or between the gauges to see what's behind them. It's a pretty cool application and much more useful than stuffing an LCD in the fender well.

The second version of the ReversAid puts the LCD in a slideout panel attached to the rearview mirror. Again, selecting reverse gear activates the camera and the panel automatically slides from behind the mirror.

Magna says the two products are already available as factory options in some cars now, and should begin showing up in several other automakers' cars soon. It's also available in aftermarket from Hitchcam.