Having spent a nice week in malvern on leaving the site a fellow eriba owner asked me why I use towing mirrors as because the eribas are that narrow that they are not legally required??????

Ignore him, my car is wider than my Familia and I can definitely see more with my mirrors than without them

Whether they are legally required or not is not the issue as far as I am concerned. It is clear to me that visibilty to the rear is *hugely* improved with the addition of the mirrors. I, for one, would not be without them.

Why wouldn't you?

And why give the police an obvious cause to stop you, even if you can see the required view without additional mirrors?

You do, also, have to be careful that your mirrors aren't too wide. My V70 had to have cut down arms to make it comply when towing my Triton. Although there’s no law in the UK requiring the specific use of extension mirrors when towing, you must be able to see four metres out from the caravan and 20 metres behind the driver. To prevent your tow car becoming an additional hazard, there is a maximum distance of 25cm that the mirrors may extend out beyond the width of your whole outfit; this is reduced to a maximum of 20cm on cars manufactured prior to 26th January 2007 ("why?" I hear you ask - I have no idea!).

Many tow cars are wider than the smaller Eribas, so, in that case, the additional mirrors can only protrude 25cm beyond the width of your original car mirrors. If your car is narrower than your caravan, then it's 25cm wider than the caravan body.

The diagram attached is representative of those you can find. However it doesn't tell the whole story - If your mirrors are wider than your outfit, then you can see further into the "blind" area behind your caravan - Therefore, the further out the mirrors go, the more of that area behind the caravan you can see. Up to a max of 250mm... On the French Autoroute they seem to like zooming right up behind a caravan before pulling out suddenly to overtake. This isn't much fun when towing, so it's better to be able to see as much of the road behind your outfit as possible.

I have a camera in my caravan's rear window that transmits via wireless to an iPad Mini on my dashboard - this helps show that "tailgate hogger", however the UK law says that a camera cannot replace mirrors (this may change in the future). In our two years with a camper van we left the rear view camera on while driving to help with that blind spot issue.

So, if you are towing a Puck behind your SUV you may not, in theory, need any extension mirrors. However it's not much fun having that philosophical discussion with the policeman who pulls you over for not having towing mirrors (even if he's wrong). You would almost certainly win later in court, but I'd rather not have to go that route...

There's a very good synopsis of all caravan mirror issues on the CASSOA website:

https://www.cassoa.co.uk/towing-mirrors/

Simples...

Simon

Cheers colin