Night Light: Night-Vision Systems Compared from BMW, Mercedes, and Audi

Night Light: Night-Vision Systems Compared from BMW, Mercedes, and Audi Night Light: Night-Vision Systems Compared from BMW, Mercedes, and Audi
Comparison Tests

We know a guy who claims to have driven his entire 48-mile morning commute to work in a 7-series BMW without ever looking out the car’s glass. This, we pause to point out, is a monumentally stupid thing to do.

The 7-series in question was equipped with a night-vision system that displays an image of the road ahead by picking up infrared radiation to which human eyes are blind. The image, displayed in black and white on the BMW’s nav screen, is therefore a heat signature. Hot items (car exhaust, people, javelinas) appear to radiate the sort of divine glow that a halo in an early Renaissance painting might. Cold items (the sky, winter roadways, very dead javelinas) appear black.

Unlike at least one of its German competitors, BMW allows drivers to view this during daylight hours, which is a curious and mostly pointless capability but is critical to the continuation of the anecdote we’ve begun. If ever you choose to do this with your (or preferably your enemy’s) 7-series, here is what you would see:

A black pathway stretching out to the horizon, bordered by walls of mottled white foliage. Texture and details wash away, leaving the world ahead looking like an early video-driving game, simplified and artificial. Gliding over this blackness are spectral white boxes and blobs, each casting beneath itself a white shadow made of  heat. The perspective of the camera makes it appear as if these ghostly coffers are being drawn inexorably toward the bottom of a black sky. You can see for the first time exhaust gases fluttering out of tailpipes. Not smoke, mind you—this is otherwise invisible gas, made visible by its heat, merging nervously with the atmosphere. You see the differential pumpkins on pickups lit up like jack-o’-lanterns. You realize you are seeing a layer of reality not normally accessible to you. This does not help you drive properly.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the guy who claims to have commuted using only this otherworldly image (while listening to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid at near-maximum volume) reported that by the time he’d made it to his office, he felt as if he’d been “punched in the brain.”

We have no intention of replicating that test.  And each manufacturer that currently sells a system in the U.S. (Audi, BMW, Lexus, and Mercedes-Benz) specifically warns against using its respective night-vision display as one’s sole connection with reality. Further, it’s not only reprehensible to drive a car in this fashion; it’s also illegal in a wide variety of ways.

Still, we’re intrigued by these systems and their capabilities. Could what this guy claims possibly be true? And more important, can these systems turn drivers into nocturnal animals, or at least better, more attentive night drivers? To find out, we would need science.

We would need a controlled environment. We would need to run each available system through a series of repeatable, if absurd, tests [see sidebar]. We would need at least one low-level employee stouter of  body than of sense. We would need a very large roll of brown paper.  And, yes, we would need what surely must be the only radio-controlled turkey in all of  Washtenaw County, Michigan.

The story of automotive night-vision systems is a short one. It began with the 2000 Cadillac DeVille and its optional $2000 setup that projected a decidedly fuzzy, green image onto the windshield in front of the driver. Night-vision capability had become all the rage less than a decade prior, thanks to a television program and conflict known as the Persian Gulf War, Part I. Who could forget the vignetted and glowing, green camera shots? Cadillac’s system was made by defense contractor and creator of the Patriot missile, Raytheon. That the company also invented the microwave oven is not particularly pertinent. The promise then, as now, was that the setup would allow a driver to “see” farther into the darkness than his own eyes would allow. The result was a brief stay on the market, during which time GM began offering the system on Hummer H2s (oh, the military chic of the era!) before quietly taking it off  the options list in 2004.

Mercedes and BMW, ever the binary star of the German luxury-car market, each introduced systems for ’05.  Audi didn’t hop on the night-vision train until 2010. Lexus offers a system on the 2013 GS, but we didn’t manage to grab one of those for testing.