Confessions of an Oxytocin Addict

I believe that car manufacturers are leaving money on the table by not eliminating physical sun visors altogether. My guess is that the technical challenges to delivering a more elegant solution are many, but here is the problem and what I believe is an excellent solution.

Physical sun visors in today’s cars and trucks are anachronistic leftovers from the earliest days of automobiles. In an era where we have digital dashboards, Apple CarPlay and WiFi hotspots, why the fuck can’t we have a better solution for blocking the sun from our eyes while we are driving?

PROBLEM: As it stands now, in order to block the sun from our eyes while driving, we have to use and manipulate a physical object with one hand while continuing to drive with the other. If I recall, my driver’s ed teacher was not keen on one-handed driving, and I do believe that the general rule-of-thumb is to keep both hands on the wheel, yes??

So while two-handed driving is the expected as well as safest driving behavior, when the sun is suddenly right in your eyes and blinding you — in that critical driving moment, unable to see much of anything — you are expected to deftly grab the sun visor with one hand and move it into the precise location needed to block the offending sun. Seriously?!?

Now on the face of it, one can argue that taking one hand off the wheel for a brief period of time is not that big of a deal. Drivers do it all the time. And one can argue that it is very little to ask of a driver, moving the sun visor. It is not an onerous or difficult task, with arguably little to no effect on the driver’s ability to continue to drive safely.

OK, I will grant that that may be true. But have you driven in Seattle? Ever? And I can’t imagine Seattle or the Pacific Northwest is the only geographic location where drivers spend long periods of any given day with the sun low in the horizon and right in their eyes. Seriously. Right in your eyes. Like daggers. Oh, and of course you also can’t see anything as you are attempting to drive a motor vehicle when that happens. Great fun.

So now, imagine a situation where you are turning or changing direction often, such as with any in-city driving or at times on certain sections of highways and interstates. And imagine you have that pesky low-in-the-horizon sun situation. Now in this context, that one time supposedly “simple” move-the-visor-down gets complicated. Usually the first step is when you, as the driver, have to move the visor from its location above the dashboard to your left, a metaphorical tack and the sun visor, the sailboat boom. And if you as the driver keep changing direction in the car, you have to keep tacking, moving the visor to above the dash, to the top of driver’s window, to above the dash, to the top of driver’s window again, over and over, maybe every few minutes, sometimes even seconds, as you navigate the city, left and right, into and out of and back into the sun.

So my question is how the hell can that be even remotely safe? And note too that the in-city driving scenario, in particular, means that the driver is frequently getting hit with the sun in a new location as they are turning their vehicle left or right. So the driver is having to turn the car *and* move the sun visor into a new position at the same time, all the while not able to see all that well, in moments, due to the blinding sunlight.

Bottom line is that this is way more challenging than it should be. Drivers should never have to take one hand off the wheel in order to do anything necessary to safely drive the vehicle. But that is what sun visors require. And for drivers in certain geographies, such as the Pacific Northwest, where the sun is frequently low in the horizon and thus right in your drivers’ eyes, moving and manipulating the sun visor is a frequent and honestly onerous and unsafe activity.

SOLUTION: What we need is the glass of the windshield and that of the driver and passenger windows to be tinted along the top and for that tinting to get darker when the light intensity increases and lighter when the light intensity decreases, similar to what some prescription eyeglasses do when exposed to sunlight. The goal is that the windshield and windows do the work of darkening and lightening as needed in response to the sunlight such that the driver never has to do anything. BOOM. Problem solved.

FYI the featured image is a photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash. Thanks Clem!