Hell, that title is a mouthful. Luckily, its subject is pretty simple though – I bought a new rearview mirror, and it arrived today from the land of fun and cool. This is about as JDM a part as you’re going to find, assuming you care about such things. I do to a certain extent, and I especially like parts that are somewhat off the beaten path. I also happen to value functionality too, so thankfully this mirror isn’t just pretty. It’s also not my first rodeo with these mirrors, so suffice it to say, I’m a fan.
Specifically, my first experience with the Zoom Engineering TS mirror was on my ’07 Honda Fit. That was a car that I also modded pretty extensively, and in particular I added quite a few obscure JDM parts to the build. This mirror was one of them. Now, to be fair, these aren’t like some unobtainium part – in fact, they’re exceptionally easy to purchase if you know about them because you can order them directly from Zoom Engineering and they’ll ship them to foreign countries no problem. Their site will even switch to English for you to make things easier. This is a kinda rare thing for a JDM company, especially small ones like Zoom. Anyway, as I was saying, these aren’t hard to get per se, but they’re not something you’ll see on most modded cars around here (here being the U.S. in my case) and they’re not really well known. I found out about them originally by reading JDM owners’ websites, and in Japan tuners typically know about these mirrors.
By now, you’re probably asking what the big deal is? To put it simply, they are extremely well made, cool and unique looking mirrors that have a significantly wider field of view than your standard rearview mirror (similar to your right-hand side door mirror) and are slightly blue tinted as well to help with clarity and glare. Effectively, they allow you to see more of the the sides when you look in your rearview mirror, so they can help eliminate blindspots that you normally have to deal with when using the stock OEM mirror. I should also mention that the mirror I bought is only one style of rearview mirror Zoom makes; specifically, it’s very similar shape and size-wise to an OEM mirror, but looks far better and has the wide-angle plus tinting to boot. Zoom makes a whole host of other mirrors in various styles and finishes so those really are worth checking out as well. You may like one of them even better than this style and they will be just as well made, stylish, and useful.
In any case, ordering was very simple as I mentioned, and from the time of ordering to when I received it today was almost exactly one week, which is impressive considering how far it had to travel. I should also mention another reason to order from Zoom directly, and that is price. From a quick search here and there, the average price JDM importers are asking is about $200-250 for the mirror and about $35-40 more for the mounting arm, which you have to purchase as well. In comparison, with the current conversion rate for Japanese Yen, if you order directly from Zoom, then the out-the-door price for everything – mirror, arm, and shipping – runs about $175 USD or so. That’s a big difference, so yeah, order it from Zoom, boys. Also, another cool point about these mirrors is that the mirror itself is universal – the only thing that changes based on the car is the mounting arm, and those can be purchased separately, so realistically you can buy the mirror once and then just move it from car to car as you go over the years by buying only the arm and swapping it. Yup, technically I could have used the mirror from my Fit on my BRZ fourteen years later by just buying a new arm (though I sold the mirror with the Fit at the time, but still . . . ). Value boys, value. And in case you’re wondering, the arm you need to buy for the ’22+ BRZ/GR86 is the G03 Murakami 7225 arm.
With that, I suppose it’s time to wrap it up for now with a few more pics. I haven’t had a chance to install it yet, but I will in a day or two. I’ll post some installed pics once I do so you can see how it looks in actual use. For me, it’ll be kinda like coming home again, so looking forward to good times ahead looking behind me as I drive.
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