These Funky Mirrors on JDM Vans Were Made for a Time Before Backup Cameras

I stumbled on a clever piece of old-school analog car tech this morning that I’d never seen before. While scouring the internet for ’90s JDM vans (a habit that’s become concerningly frequent), I found this 1996 Nissan Serena on Cars & Bids. The Serena happens to be pretty neat, with some cool interior features—but it wasn’t the van that caught my eye. Instead, it was the funny-looking mirror hanging off the top of the rear tailgate that intrigued me. I needed to know more.

As it turns out, the Serena’s funky rear mirror was commonplace on vans and work vehicles in many Asian countries, and it’s essentially an analog backup camera. The mirror allows the driver to see what’s directly behind the van, all the way from the typical rearview mirror. It’d help when reversing up to a curb with precision, or to catch low or small obstructions that normally would be blocked by the bottom half of the tailgate. Despite the mirror itself being tiny and probably hard to see through, it was a clever innovation in the age before backup cameras.

Of course, it wasn’t entirely a low-tech stand-in for a backup cam—it wouldn’t help you see far behind, but then, that’s what your other mirrors were for. And it wasn’t just JDM vans that had ’em, either. United States Postal Service vans sported them for decades—particularly the old Grumman LLVs—as did vehicles belonging to FedEx and other delivery firms.

In such cases, these mirrors are both for seeing what’s behind the van and also for making sure no one is trying to snag packages from the back door. Also, you check them via the side mirrors; LLVs don’t have rearview mirrors, not that they’d do you much good anyway.

Some delivery vehicles are still set up with these convex corner mirrors, but it seems they’re falling in favor thanks to, you guessed it, backup cameras.

That’s one curiosity, answered. As for me, my quest for a strange and unusual utility vehicle will continue—whether it’s a JDM van like the Serena, a smaller Kei van, or an old, imported Land Rover that is not a van, but will ruin me financially. If I ever get such a vehicle, whatever it is, I’m going to figure out how to add one of these funky mirrors, because they just make so much sense.

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