Broke My Driver Side Mirror
We’ve been backing our cars into the garage for years, a practice we started primarily for safety as there were lots of little kids in the neighborhood. Now it also works well because the charging for the Ioniq is in the rear.
A few months ago while backing in I was a little too careless and got the driver mirror too close to the side of the garage. I noticed and stopped before I hit anything and pressed “D” to pull forward a bit and straighten out. Or so I thought.
Unfortunately, the “D” didn’t register and I remained in “R”. When I took my foot off the accelerator (auto hold was not on), the car rolled back and the mirror hit the side of the garage. Arg!
It made a rather loud bang and looked like this:
That looks pretty bad, but as you can see it all snapped back together rather easily.
The mirror was pretty destroyed, though. I was initially concerned at going to the dealer to get this fixed ($500+) so I decided to do a little internet searching.
I found a replacement mirror and bracket on Amazon for just $35, so I ordered it right away. It arrived a few days later.
Installation was pretty easy. It came with a couple small metal brackets I needed to attach, but it otherwise just snapped in place of the old mirror assembly. The first time I attached it, I didn’t get the lever for the left/right positioning set properly, but it worked when I tried it again.
This mirror worked fine but it had two issues. It was more of a convex glass so things looked smaller than they did before, more similar to how they look in the passenger mirror. Also it had some glare.
The one benefit of this is that there was no blind spot, but after a couple weeks I still couldn’t get used to it so I did more internet searching.
I found another company that sold a stick on mirror, also for $35, and purchased that. It also arrived in just a couple days. I attached the sticky pads to the back and stuck the entire thing over the existing mirror.
It’s not quite an exact match, but it’s pretty close. This mirror is normal and things are the correct size, plus there’s no glare! Hopefully it stays on over the winter…
Another option I could have done is to buy an entire mirror assembly and replace that. I found some on eBay for about $130 or so. But one problem is that I could not find an exact match for my Ioniq SE. The mirrors all had the embedded turn signal indicator in them, which my car does not have. I’d also need to paint it to match the color of the car, or get two and leave them both black. It looks like replacing the entire assembly is also rather easy — you just pop off a panel from the door and unscrew things. This will be my backup plan should the mirrors I have on there now not work out.