Prius side mirrors at different angles to car body???

maybe it provides the same view from the drivers seat, since it is not centered.

 

i've never noticed on 3 pri in 10 years, i'll have to look closely.

 

I haven't checked my Prius, but I googled "cars from above" and quite a few have the driver side mirror angled further out than the one on the passenger side. Here's a Ferrari, for example:



As bisco says, because the driver's seat isn't centered the mirrors have to be angled differently in order to give the same rear view. Some cars may do this by having the mirror housings at different angles, as above, while others may just change the angle of the mirror itself within the housing.

 

I noticed this too, and my hypothesis was:

(a) The housing is differently shaped in the Prius for aerodynamic reasons - the side mirrors are a major source of drag (for example, the reason a Nissan Leaf looks like a frog is because they designed those bulbous headlights to redirect air away from its side mirrors, avoiding that drag).

Anyway, (b) the differently shaped Prius mirror housing reduces the extent of rotational freedom available to the mirror (ever tried lowering your right side mirror to gauge distance from the curb while parallel parking in a Prius? Its somewhat difficult to get it to go all the way down like you could in most other cars).

Therefore, (c) not being able to utilize the rotational space as in other cars to angle the mirror's base position, they had to reorient the entire housing for optimum viewing and for enabling sufficient left-right/top-bottom variance for the driver's individual circumstances.

Just my two cents.

 

That's unpossible. If the mirrors are positioned exactly symmetrically, the only place you will get the same relative view in both is if you are equidistant from both (i.e. in the center of the car). Angle of Incidence = Angle of Reflection; it's physics. But perhaps the design on your wife's car makes the asymmetric placement more subtle?

It's hard to tell from the lighting (and this is obviously a rendering), but the image that Lexus uses to illustrate DRCC for the ES350 seems to show that the mirrors are slightly asymmetric. Not nearly as much as ftl's Ferrari example, but it's there.

 

That's exactly it. Here's the Ferrari (not *my* Ferrari, unfortunately!) with lines drawn from the driver's head position (approximately) showing how the angles have to be quite different on the two mirrors in order to provide the same rear view:

 

Ah, but with the wide angle of the passenger side mirror its aim is nowhere near as critical as the planar mirror. You could aim them the same and use them that way (suboptimally).