M-C North America Inc. is the leading worldwide provider and manufacturer of mirrors and mirror systems for the transportation industry, including construction, agriculture, package and mail delivery, trucking and transport, mining, military, trash hauling, emergency rescue, bus transit, and more.
M-C North America is the only one of its kind in the world offering mirrors with the revolutionary safety technology providing elimination of blind-spots, glare and vibration in the same product.
All mirror manufacturers offering mine truck mirrors offer a one-rate of curvature convex mirror to the OEM’s for installation on the mine truck.
Attempting to solve the proximity area visibility problem with the singe-rate of curvature convex mirror is hampered by the fact that this type of mirror will always produce a fixed field of view and images viewed will be diminished in size. When images reproduced are diminished in size, referred to as distortion, the brain is required to take some time to analyze the image to understand it before any action is undertaken. The greater the reduction in size of images presented; the greater the time the brain takes and can reach a level where the brain cannot understand the image at all.
With the one-rate of curvature mirror the only way to increase the view provided is by increasing the size of the mirror itself or by decreasing the rate of curvature of the glass.
With the one rate of curvature convex mirror, then mirror manufacturers and OEM’s are left with reducing the rate of curvature and noting that mirrors on mine trucks and big loaders are located approximately 15-20 feet off the ground the rate of curvature necessary to show the operator the ground would have to be so severe that the mirrors would resemble the mirrors located on the front of school buses for pedestrian detection which have such a high level of distortion that they cannot be used for driving mirrors.
M-C North America is the only one of its kind in the world offering mirrors with the revolutionary safety technology providing elimination of blind-spots, glare and vibration in the same product.
M-C North America has engineered and patented a proprietary mirror glass where the overall radius of curvature is created in a way that enables us to control the field of view and the images presented. We can expand the view and keep the images so close to normal size and appearance that the brain does not have to take time to understand what is presented. We call the clarity of images “real-time” images as opposed to those presented by the single rate of curvature convex mirror, which is defined as a “delayed-time” image.
Another innovation introduced by M-C North America Inc. is a manufacturing process to allow the fusion of two different pieces of glass, each of a different rate of curvature, seamlessly into a single mirror. For the big mine trucks this allows us to provide a mirror of 2000mm rate of curvature in the center of the glass with a border around the edges of 1000 mm rate of curvature glass for
even greater expansion of the field of view. The combination of two separate rates of curvature can be designed and produced in the same mirror, and the overall view delivers unmatched clarity of objects seen by the operator.