ArizonaRangers
Well-Known Member
- First Name
- Eric
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2020
- Threads
- 2
- Messages
- 86
- Reaction score
- 260
- Location
- Goodyear AZ
- Vehicle(s)
- 2019 Ranger Sport 4x4 4D and 2023 Tesla Model 3
- Occupation
- Engineer
- Thread starter
- #1
I installed Clearview Towing mirrors and here's my thoughts.
https://www.clearviewmirrorsusa.com/towing-mirrors/ford-ranger-north-america/
The Ranger is a fantastic tow vehicle. It is too bad that Ford hindered it with no brake controller or towing mirrors.
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https://www.clearviewmirrorsusa.com/towing-mirrors/ford-ranger-north-america/
- The Clearview's are extremely heavy compared to the stock mirrors. That concerns me a little bit. Between the extra weight, the extended lever arm, tugging on them to extend them, and the extra wind resistance, I'm nervous this could put a lot of stress on the mounting point on the door.
- Instead of creating a very clean electrical connection point like the oem mirrors have, the Clearview’s have a foot long rats nest of wires to fish through the door and risk damaging. Then you have to find a suitable place behind the door panel to tuck them. It just seemed like a lazy design.
- I had several days in between having time to install the first mirror and second mirror. This allowed me to drive around with one Clearview and one oem mirror. The oem mirror has a significantly better field of view due to the Clearview’s vertical mirror design. Even the convex bottom mirror was no match for the width of view of the oem.
- The height and overall bulk of the Clearview also creates a blind spot (when retracted) to the side roads when at an intersection. It requires various head movements to see around the mirror to see if there are cars on the side roads. I think a Ram type mirror that folds in horizontally for normal driving and unfolds out vertically for towing would have worked better than this design.
- There is considerably more wind noise generated by the Clearview and thus wind resistance. Not enough to notice it over the radio, but with no radio, wind noise is clearly present.
- There is slight shaking you can see while looking in the mirror compared to the oem mirror, but not very bad or enough to make clear rear vision difficult. This is an edited in bullet point because, I forgot it was shaking after I had both mirrors on. I only noticed it when I had one of each to compare.
- Folding in abilities are pretty limited. Retracted, the mirrors stick out 14” from the door. Folded in that only goes down to 10 ½”. It seems like they could have been designed to fold in tighter than what they do. Had I known how little space the folding saves, I would have purchased the $500 pair that doesn’t fold instead of the $1000 pair that does.
The Ranger is a fantastic tow vehicle. It is too bad that Ford hindered it with no brake controller or towing mirrors.
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