Merc with no mirrors

Ian58:
Mercedes say between 3% and 5% saving not 13%.

That certainly seems more credible, that there would be up to a 3% saving on a wagon that spends all day flying up and down the motorway at top speed, without carrying a load or even a trailer, and where fuel costs are thus almost entirely air resistance.

I can believe that mirrors represent 3% of the frontal surface area and overall air drag of a wagon.

5% fuel saving in any real-world use seems ludicrous.

Whether drivers will accept inferior cameras rather than glass mirrors, and whether the likely cost and complexity of the setup is worth the saving, is another thing entirely. There is no depth perception through cameras-and-screens, whereas there is through mirrors.

Another thing is that most of us clip the mirrors occasionally in our lives, or have them clipped - that’s the signal that you’re (or they’re) too close, and they enforce a permanent margin of error, but also allow us to refine our judgments in getting fairly close to things, without too much being at stake.

They also provide a focal point for judging how close an oncoming vehicle is - without them, you’d have to judge how close the entire side surface of the vehicle was, including any irregularities (such as the fact that the trailer may be slightly wider than the cab front) or the effects of road camber (the top and bottom of the vehicle may be at different distances, if the vehicles are not level on approach - the mirror, protruding much further than any normal camber could cause, allows us to forget about these problems).

God knows what would happen if the first sign of poor judgment and being too close to something was a full frontal impact, or a “Trains Planes and Automobiles”-style scar down the full length of the sides.

Personally, I think mirrors will be here to stay.