Industry profile - Clearview Accessories

Time flies. Whether you’re thinking of easing off the throttle a bit and taking life easy or wondering if you’ve reached the pinnacle of your profession, it probably only seems like yesterday you were ‘starting off’. It’s something Clearview Accessories’ Mike Cowan can relate to when he thinks back to how his incredibly successful off-road aftermarket accessories business started. And it was all because he couldn’t see what he needed to see ...

Inspiration from frustration

It was the early 2000s when Mike Cowan first thought of what would become the success that is Clearview Accessories and, unsurprisingly, it was while he was towing a caravan behind his then-tourer, a LandCruiser 80 Series, which had the misfortune of following on from his previous tow-rig, a monster Ford F-350. You see (excuse the pun), the big Effy’s bulk meant it had, fitted to it, rear-view mirrors that were fit for purpose, when it comes to rearward vision. Something the otherwise impressive 80 Series lacked.

“It was frustration, really,” Mike recounts. “I have a background in towing, and I had been towing for a long time. I had an F-350 before the Toyota; it was a big American truck, and it had really good mirrors on it. Then when I bought my 80 Series, I’d hook my caravan up and drive out the front gate and all I could see was caravan.”

This situation led to some thinking for Mike, who resolved to try and replicate what he’d experienced with the Ford’s more effective mirrors. To this end, he imported a set of Silverado mirrors from the USA and fitted them to his 80 Series. The results were excellent – as was the attention from fellow towing enthusiasts.

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The Clearview shop truck in testing Tasmanian mud

“People would just flock over when we drove in to a caravan park,” he laughs. “You know what it’s like at parks; they’re all looking at what everybody else has got. When they saw my tow mirrors, I had people asking me to make some for them. And then one guy offered me a blank cheque and told me to fill it in when I was finished.”

The past and the present

Understandably, that was what convinced Mike his idea was a bloody good one. He’d just built a set for himself and was initially just satisfied to have a set of mirrors that actually worked, but when offers of what he terms “stupid money” started coming in, he knew there was a definite market in Australia for a product such as that, thus Clearview Accessories was born.

At the start, it was just Mike and his son-in-law Jay Praag, who had previously worked in another business with him. However, the team – and the product range – soon grew to the point that, today, Clearview is considered one of the aftermarket leaders in the towing and 4x4 scene and has more than 1500 partner dealerships across Australia, as well as more globally, in countries such as the USA, New Zealand, South Africa, and regions including the Middle East, South East Asia and Europe.

Today, Clearview mirrors are available for most of the 4x4 market here in Australia, with only a few not being catered for. This is due to the structural requirements for fitment of the mirrors; unlike flimsy strap-on mirror extensions, with a full replacement mirror, a vehicle’s door needs to be strong enough to cope with the replacement mirror.

All of Clearview’s mirrors meet the required ADRs for each available vehicle model fitment, with that process taking a little bit of toing and froing across a number of design aspects, including what was the original gestation of Mike’s idea – rear vision – as he explains.

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Mike Cowan with his latest creation: the Power Slide fridge slide

“You have what you call the field of vision,” he says. “That field of vision needs to be a certain area back behind the vehicle. And yeah, you’ve got to be able to comply with that, and all your lights and everything must be to a certain standard. There’s a fair bit in the ADR requirements.”

Proving, again, that Mike and his team aren’t content with a product that is super-popular and highly regarded, Clearview has released its next-gen mirror, with some clever tweaks to the original design, borne from customer feedback. Being a well-known (and easily approachable) part of the touring community means Mike is always getting stopped for a yarn about a customer’s Clearview products, something he is always grateful for.

“Most of the stuff we do is from people asking us, ‘Have you thought about doing this and can you do that?’ We listen to what our customers are asking us.”

Future vision is now

Today, Clearview is known for more than just its mirrors, with its fridge slides also very popular with tourers – with good reason, and again because it listens to its customers. Probably the best example of the company’s continual focus on improving products and bringing exciting new ones to the market is its innovative Power Slide fridge slide. This is the world’s first patented aluminium (more on that later) powered fridge slide that is the result of three years of development and extensive testing (it outlasted 10,000 movements during the test period). To say Mike is chuffed about the Power Slide is an understatement.

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Making a great extending mirror was the start for Clearview Accessories

Originally powering up one of its existing Easy Slides, the team realised that, to make the best possible product, they’d have to do more than just add actuators to a fridge-slide.

“We did do an easy slide with electric actuators on it,” Mike says. “But there’s sometimes when you change things, you get to a point where you look at it and you go, ‘I can make this better.’ And everybody was saying to us that our slides were heavy, which they were – they were steel.

“We decided what we would do is, we would build one out of aluminium. Our new Power Slide is mostly aluminium. When I say mostly, just the bearing runners are steel and that’s where it gets its strength, and the scissor arms are still steel. But everything else is aluminium. And we’ve used aluminium extrusion for the rails that attach to the bearing runners.”

The team figured out early on that the slide was going to be more expensive than its Easy Slide stablemate, so they would start from scratch with the whole design, rather than rehashing a design that’s been around for years, as Mike explains in relation to the Power Slide’s development process.

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“You take something that’s 20 years old and just keep making tweaks to it,” he says. “And it comes to a point where you’ve got to start again, and we don’t like to take something that’s old and adapt to it because that’s all it is, it’s just adapting; we want to redesign it.

“We have straightened out all the scissor arms, we’ve made it so that it’s more compact. It’s not as wide as what it was before, and that allows the actuators to work directly in line instead of offset, and just made a better product out of it.”

Probably the cleverest part of the Power Slide’s design, though, is what Mike calls the ‘brain box’ or synchronising module. This ensures the motor in each of the rams is in sync, as Mike explains, “It talks to both motors so they come down at the same time,” thus eliminating the chance of one lowering quicker than another, something sometimes seen in a set-up without a synch module, even if both motors are the same capacity. The Power Slide was then tested with 120kg of weight and running a duty cycle for 24 hours a day, for 30 days.

No slowing down

It's clever and impressive stuff, but when you think of how Clearview started – with smart thinking, innovation, and a passion to make something work as effectively as possible – maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at how the company’s latest product has turned out. Since he started the business, Mike has continued to push the design envelope with all the Clearview Accessories products. For us off-road tourers, that’s always going to be a good thing!