kevy002

I had the good fortune of following a Fusion without a spoiler for a while today while heading home for lunch. At eye level while driving, I can see the center brake light covering the bottom part of the mirror on certain bumps. Headlights of vehicles are lower than eye level, so it looks like the light would most likely be blocked at certain distances. Without the brake light there, I see nothing else to block light from hitting the sensors on the mirror. Next time you follow a Fusion without a spoiler, look at the brake light in relation to the mirror.

Yes, I wish I had the spoiler.... Well i can say my mirror isn't pulled down low, but I don't want to adjust it so I'm seeing mostly headliner. I have it adjusted so I see the road. It's not an issue of it not working all the time, just not working when a vehicle is directly behind you. It doesn't happen all the time, just when a vehicle is following the perfect distance directly behind. I was on the highway once and the mirror worked great as this car was quite a ways behind. Until he got fairly close, the mirror dimmed as intended. As they got closer, the mirror quit dimming. As they moved to the left of me to pass, the mirror started working again. I am going to see what I can hack together to remove that center brake light and replace with with a much shorter LED based brake light. I am certain that will solve the issue. Or I can just get the spoiler. :)

Well I did my part and called Ford of Canada to issue a complaint about it. It took me a while to explain to the customer service rep what what happening. I doubt anything will ever be done about it, still love the car despite the one design flaw.

I have an 08 SE that has this problem too. Tried the 180 degree flip and it helped l lot, but the compass reading on the dash got all screwy. Tried recal'ing but didn't help. Flipped the mirror back and the compass works. So now I've been paying attention to other car's third brake lights... some are made of LED's and are not as tall as ours. Do you think replacing the third brake light with something like that would help? I'm probably not going to add a spoiler to my car, so finding other ways to solve this issue is important.