Forward Visibility in Vehicles Worse Than 25 Years Ago: IIHS

•    A study by the IIHS finds that forward visibility in new vehicles today is worse than it was 25 years ago.

If there's one thing that has significantly deteriorated in modern vehicles over the years and decades, it's visibility. In some models, rear visibility is downright terrible.

Here’s what else has become more apparent in recent years: bigger blind spots looking forward, most notably due to vehicles’ A-pillars. Those have gotten heftier to meet creasingly strict safety standards. But one result is that they increasingly obstruct drivers’ view.

The IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety), which conducts crash tests on new vehicles, developed a new method to assess just how much obstruction drivers are getting. A Department of Transportation study concludes that the situation has worsened over the past 25 years.

The method used by the IIHS is designed to measure and compare what a driver can see within a 180-degree angle forward and outward from a vehicle. It uses a camera that analyses the driver's vision; the image is then processed to determine the percentage of the road visible within a given radius and what is blocked by the A-pillars, hood and side mirrors of the vehicle.

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