Passenger side rear view mirror rotated wrong direction

My wife came home yesterday evening and reported that she had hung up the passenger side rear view mirror of our 2007 on a concrete pillar while slowly backing into a parking space. (Somehow it was the pillar's fault.) I went out expecting to see it either missing or dangling there, but it looked perfectly normal. So I tried moving it (carefully) and discovered that these mirrors normally will actually rotate "the wrong way" quite a bit, which is why it didn't just tear off. That is, while it will rotate 90 degrees when folded in normally, it can also rotate almost as far when "folded in the wrong way". The movement didn't feel much different than the unsullied passenger side mirror, with two exceptions. First, it felt very slightly rougher. That might just be dirt, dust, leaf fragments, or spider webs, as the car was really dirty at the time. Secondly, when in the "normal" driving position if lifted gently at the distal end it had a bit more range of motion. Hard to measure, but if the normal driver's side was as designed (probably) and its wobble range up/down was 2 mm then the passenger side had a range more like 4 mm. It didn't feel loose though, just more flexible.

I have never had one of these mirrors off on this car. Had I not been told it been bent backwards by a pillar I probably would never have given the slight difference between them a moment's thought. So do I need to take it off and/or disassemble it to check for broken plastic somewhere, or is this degree of difference normal?

Good thing it wasn't her Accord, those mirrors are fixed, with no give whatsoever.

Thanks.

 

You are referring to the cover on the inside of the door? I'm going to assume that once that is off I'm going to see 3 mounting bolts coming in with nuts on them. And it would still look like that even if the mirror part of the unit has been completely destroyed and is no longer present.

How does one release the colored plastic cover on the anterior side of the mirror module? If anything is broken inside it should be obvious once that is off. The manual has a picture of the retaining clips for it, which I'm sure makes perfect sense if one has already seen the actual object, but lacking that knowledge I couldn't see how this was to be released. Half the time in a case like this it is just pried off, and the other half of the time the cover needs some magic incantation and specific release motions applied to bits which are completely invisible from the outside.