Tools

It is one of the enduring non-wonders of technology that the standard design of cars hasn’t altered much in almost 120 years.

The rate of development in car peripherals, however, especially electronic gadgets, is exponential. As late as the 1970s, when men still wore a hat and gloves to drive, I remember people regarding a car heater as the sign of a chap lacking backbone, a radio as being something for softies and central locking as strictly for the terminally lazy.

Today, I would hate to drive without satnav. Yet only very recently I was testing early satnav systems that were expensive, complicated, crude and inaccurate.

In 2001, when satnav was common but not standard, I bookmarked a BBC website page on military-style night vision systems, which ended with the sentence, “They say night vision will one day be standard in the family car.”

Unlikely though that sounded and still might sound, infrared night vision is now appearing on almost normal family cars at high speed. Mercedes offered it on its fancy S-Class a couple of years ago, and has just started fitting it as an option to its £28,000-and-up E-Class. BMW also has it on its 5, 6 and 7 Series; you can get a new 5 series with night vision for just under £29,000.

Now, when satnav was starting to filter down to the masses, it was impossible to think of a downside. 


Night vision, though, safety considerations apart, could come with problems. What’s amazing about it is that, with 
a little care, you can drive in the pitch dark without headlights. The car’s invisible infrared beams light up all that’s necessary.

Mercedes recently demonstrated its new Night View Assist Plus system by getting journalists to drive a tortuous mountain route at night without lights. All very nice, but if I were interested in committing crime at night, I might be racing to my nearest Mercedes dealer. This is not remotely Mercedes’ fault, but it’s not difficult to see night vision one day soon acquiring quite an ambiguous image.

A look down Mercedes’ spec for the midmarket E-Class reveals some other futuristic gadgets. You can have headlights that respond to avoid dazzling other drivers, a steering wheel that vibrates if you stray out of lane, driver drowsiness detection and radar-based automatic emergency braking if a collision is imminent.