u/CookieDrama:

Thoughts on "objects in mirror"

Did you know the warning is federally-regulated in the US? Manufacturers don't have the option of leaving it off, and they can't change a word in it.

You can see it here: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CFR-2018-title49-vol6/xml/CFR-2018-title49-vol6-part571.xml#seqnum571.1

Section 571.111, subsection S5.4.2.

As far as I can tell, this has been part of the regulations since they were put into effect in the late 1960s.

So the big question, how come so many people swear up and down it's always been "objects in mirror MAY BE closer...."?

I spent some time today on newspapers.com, trying to find something about the introduction of the phrase on side mirrors. It seemed like a big-enough change, adding a warning to the mirror, that I reasoned it would have made the news.

So I searched both phrases. I expected to find something about it around the time the regulation was introduced, late 1960s or early 1970s at best. But the first reference I could find was in the early-mid 1980s.

In 1983, I found complaints about the 'awful' writing on the new passenger side mirrors, "objects in mirror are closer than they appear". Huh? Why regulate the convex mirrors in the late 1960s if no one was using them?

Furthermore, I couldn't find any references to "may be" prior to 1987, and they peter off around 2010.

How the hell were so many people confused about the wording by the late 80s or early 90s, when the mirror and warnings were introduced around 1983ish?

It's not just a few throwaways, there's ads and jokes and movie references all over the place with that phrase. All within about a decade of the thing being introduced?

It's bizarre.

I went into this expecting some sort of obvious trend towards one phrase or the other. I came out of it more confused than ever.

I know this is by no means exhaustive research, but this just strengthens my belief that something really weird is going on here.

Any thoughts? Any mistakes or mistaken assumptions on my part?

Any idea what's going on?


(Here's an album of some of the references I found. I just picked articles I found interesting, I didn't try to balance the numbers of each phrase.

There's also shots of search results for each phrase to show you which came up more often in the newspapers.com database.)

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file from Nov 2019
recovered Jan 2021