Are fender mirrors pointless?

My feeling is you can not ever have enough mirrors. I point my fender mirrors down to catch a small area on my passenger side I can't see very well. It helps to catch the guy on the motor scooter. I sure as hell don't want to hurt anyone. I will do anything I can to keep me and everyone around me safe. The guy that said he is too good now to use them is like the window washer that was too good to use his saftey harness, notice I said WAS.

 

I've run plenty of 14' wide loads, when I do I have extension mirrors that go on the ends of my main mirrors. I put those on, then I turn my moto mirrors out and get it done.

 

I might take issue with this part of it. We had an owner-op here at Crete (before I came here) that had mirror overkill. He had THREE fender mirrors.....on EACH FENDER! To me, that's too much and could be potentially confusing. He also had a lot of other crap on his truck, most of which has been obliterated from my feeble memory.

 

Must have been related to this guy.

 

Not far off!

 

how can top many mirrors be confusing? add long as you know that mirrors are looking behind you, I really dint see how you can get it wrong

 

After reading your post the saying "higher a teenager well they still know everything" comes to mind...

 

Well that's your opinion.

I look at it like this though, to me the fender mirror is the legacy of the mega carrier who will stick almost anyone in the truck.

One of my favorite past times has always been looking at old truck pictures, and well when you look back I don't know that I have ever seen them in the 70's, 60's or earlier. You saw a rare few in the 80's and I think really when they started to become common place was in the mid to late 90's.

Thus I think the training mirrors as they have been so aptly nicknamed are a product of these corperations putting people in a truck by themselves who had no business being there.

As I said, I had em on my first truck when I bought it, I hated them, to me they were very distracting, and often just annoyed me. I'm one of those people though that looking in a mirror when I do not want to be looking in a mirror bothers me. I am weird like that, It even bothers me when people I know take pictures of themselves in the mirror, or when I read things like posters backwards in a mirror.

I also think they make a driver lazy, I prefer to keep my head on a swivel, I constantly look in front, check the mirrors and have a pattern I go through that includes checking my gauges.

 

Naturally it's a personal preference. But as MrBeast mentioned, I too try to have my "head on a swivel", and having that many images in one glance would be highly distracting to me. Now, even after fourteen years, I like having the fender mirrors. I don't have the daylight doors in my truck, so the fender mirrors make it easier to catch one of those stupid lil' Smart Cars if it happens to be sitting on my left side. The driver's side fender mirror is disposable. But after so long, I find myself "checking" those mirrors when I'm driving my wife's Accord!

 

you know when you have daylight doors and the vortox breathers, if you keep your breathers polished you can use them to see if anything is next to you as well.