[11] Bmw Night Vision On This Month Highlight

JIM FETS

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:

JIM FETS

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.

JIM FETS

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.

JIM FETS

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.

That the BMW is the car that inspired this whole silly investigation did not help it one bit in the test. Its system is the most poorly realized of the three. Supplied by Autoliv, the same company that makes Audi’s night-vision hardware, the 750i’s arrangement is pretty basic goods. A thermographic camera is tucked into the grille. It displays its soft, dark image on the nav screen.

JIM FETS

In real-world driving, this display location is less than ideal. Audi and Mercedes use screens in the gauge cluster, closer to the driver’s line of sight. Oddly, the off-center location proved a boon in the autocross test because the steering wheel never blocked the image. And since we weren’t able to see out of the front of the vehicle, we had our eyes glued to the screen anyway. So, if you’re planning to do a lot of nighttime autocross events, with your windows covered, look no further. Keep in mind that this does not mean the BMW won; it just didn’t lose. We stayed on the course only long enough to encounter the deer, for which we stopped in time. But it was in the 750i that we became most disoriented and ended up finishing the course through the starting gate, with at least two now-useless cones crammed under the front of the car.

The BMW was the winner of the proximity test. We stopped just shy of two feet from the deer’s flank, the shortest distance of the group. But we consider the BMW to be the best of three losers because, to achieve that result, we basically kept driving until the deer all but disappeared from the screen. We think we might have been looking beneath the deer. But, a win is a win, even if it illustrates a lack of capability that the automaker did not claim to provide. The camera’s relatively low mounting position means that if you try to use it in day-to-day driving, you’d stop well short of the car in front of you because it would appear, on final approach, as if you were already under its bumper.

JIM FETS

The 750i’s $2600 system earned its last-place finish due to its weak pedestrian-detection capability. All three of these systems use recognition software that, like most current point-and-shoot digital cameras, can recognize certain shapes and graphically highlight them on the screen. Digital cameras are designed to recognize human faces. The night-vision software is designed to recognize and highlight standing human forms (so don’t go sitting on a dark road at night). If there is a legitimate use for all this camera gear (aside from being another step on the road to an automated car), pedestrian detection is it. Also, it turns out that BMW hates guys who ride recumbent bicycles. The car’s instruction manual notes that “cyclists on unconventional bicycles” are less likely to be recognized. And, thwarting our plan to outfit road warrior Zeb in a crash helmet modified with deer antlers, the system’s effectiveness is compromised if a pedestrian’s head is covered.

Okay, killjoy BMW, but here’s the problem: The pedestrian-detection system is supposed to color a detected human a “slight yellow hue.” It is so slight, however, that you would have to stop to take a good look at the image to detect the yellow at all. We therefore could not get an accurate read since we weren’t sure the system was working. Further, the image displayed on the screen is not as clear as the others. We noticed a vaguely Zeb-shaped blob from about 300 feet away, but we don’t want to see a Zeb; we want to see the Zeb.

We had very high hopes for the Mercedes. For starters, its system had easily the longest name of the test: Night View Assist Plus with spotlight function. To us, this implies that it’s the double-throwdown of night vision. Add a “–tronic” suffix to the name, and it might be able to do your laundry, too.

JIM FETS

And, true to its name, Mercedes’ system, part of the $3490 Premium Package 2 on the CL550, is more elaborate than BMW’s and Audi’s. It is the only one among them that’s considered active rather than passive (Lexus also uses an active system). This means that, unlike the other Germans, the Mercedes setup actually projects infrared radiation in front of the car and then picks it up with its windshield-mounted camera. The projection is analogous to what headlights do for your natural eyesight. The resulting image is brighter and crisper than those generated by thermographic systems. It’s more like watching a black-and-white television than viewing a science experiment in a dark room. The image is presented on a large screen in the instrument cluster.

JIM FETS

So how could the Mercedes not have won? Well, for one, it killed our turkey. The CL550 should have been a shoo-in in the autocross test. Its high-mounted camera should have provided the largest field of view, and the clarity of the screen should have provided the best orientation for the driver. Even though the CL550 driver made it through the course with only a few injured cones while successfully avoiding the deer, he annihilated the turkey without ever having seen it. This is odd, given that the Mercedes system doesn’t rely on heat radiation, and our foam animals radiated no heat other than the residual left from Zeb’s embrace.

Also, the Benz stopped about four feet from the deer in our proximity test, the worst of the group. Perhaps Mercedes simply has a soft spot for deer but not turkeys.

The Benz’s most significant shortcoming, though, was in the pedestrian-detection test. The drawback of an active system such as this one is that humans and animals appear less distinct in the display than with a thermal-based system, where the heat source (human or animal) stands proud and white on a dark background. It’s one instance where the active system’s improved picture actually works against it. That said, the Mercedes recognition system worked well enough, drawing white brackets around Zeb at a distance just short of 300 feet. Further, given the right conditions (headlights in auto-high-beam setting, night-vision system on, a minimum of 28 mph, and no oncoming traffic), Mercedes’ new spotlight system, available only on CL models, flashes a detected human with four blasts of diverted headlight. We actually got this to work. It’s the only car of the bunch that gives a specific warning to a pedestrian. So there’s that.

We admit to being surprised by the Audi’s win. The Mercedes system has flashing, diverting headlights; it blasts the road ahead with near-infrared radiation; it’s got that name. But what the Audi setup does better than the Mercedes or the BMW is notify the driver the earliest and in the clearest fashion that a pedestrian is up ahead. And that’s the most important thing this equipment ought to do.

JIM FETS

Zeb appeared as a glowing weisswurst from about 500 feet away. We might not have been able to identify him, but he was clearly not a tree. At about 300 feet, Audi’s pedestrian detection had covered him in a bright-yellow box. The system would have changed the color of the box to red had he been directly in front of the car.

As we discovered, night vision makes an awful substitute for transparent glass and a regular old pair of eyeballs. That the A8L finished second in the proximity test (at three feet from our deer) and completed the autocross course is admirable. But it also just could be luck. Night vision is a bit of a gimmick in its current form. Adding another layer of visual information is not necessarily a boon to night driving, certainly when that information is presented in a different location from the images you see through the windshield. It is potentially a significant distraction, which can diminish, not improve, your awareness during night driving.

JIM FETS

Is it worth the couple thousand dollars one of these systems costs, even if it’s only a 50th of the cost of the car into which it’s mounted? Of course it’s not. But it is worth it to the car company that appears, by association, to be on the bleeding edge of technology. And it might be worth it to the owner, who can wow his friends with this parlor trick.

But the commuting-in-the-7-series-by-night-vision guy? Total liar.

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