I got interested and wondered what the Nighvision actually looks like so I skimped over to the Japanese Honda Legend site and found it:

http://www.honda.co.jp/LEGEND/SP/ad-...ong/index.html

I already did a search for "Nightvision" but didn't come up with any VIDEOS so I thought I'd share it. don't hate me if it's a !

 

err actually there's been numerous posts in the TL section (wonder why) on it, a better video for anyone interested


http://world.honda.com/HDTV/Intellig...Vision/200408/

 

so why isn't this available to us in the states???

 

no kidding.

 

The usual nickel and diming. Honda cuts the good stuff available elsewhere because it would make our cars more pricey. Exchange rates woes.......

 

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago about nightvision in cars. They said that basically, it's a good thing but it has been around a while and hasn't caught on because it can be distracting, and overall, is pretty expensive.

LL

edit: Found the article (from Feb. 21) HERE.

 

I'm not sure I'd consider cutting something out that coule add a few thousand to the price is necessarily "nikcel and diming." The 3G RL is a tech leader. There are plenty of other things they could have left out. I think once a nightvision system proves it's marketability in the U.S. you'll see it on the RL.

LL

 

nightvision in Japan is about a $5000 option.

I think it was deemed not in the pricing models for the RL. Also, there may have been issues with our Nanny Laws.

 

I can't help but believe these things are more of a distraction than a safety device. You have to divide your attention between the road and that little screen, and since the IR image shows different stuff than your eyes see, it's almost as bad IMO as watching a DVD movie on your nav screen while driving.

I know many of you disagree, and that's fine, but one of the reasons these systems haven't gone over in Cadillac and M-B products is for that very reason. Tests have shown drivers get confused trying to watch both, and their driving suffers.

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My parents bought this hugh M-B sedan with nightvision. It is interesting - you hit a switch and it come on screen right in front of the driver - taking over the area where the speedo is.

My opinion is that it is a gimic of pretty marginal utility. I think it would only come in handy if you were on some pitch black country road. Otherwise, its a feature that I'd personally do without.

 

Somewhere, I wrote about possible limitations with the two most common infrared devices used in automotive applications. I think it was even Honda that said certain areas of the United States are considered to hot to reliably use the device. My guess is that ambient temperature can be at 98.6 or higher and the infrared system would have difficulty distinguishing the pattern.

Can someone validate or invalidate my hypothesis? I do not know how military grade infrared devices can make these distinctions, or if they suffer the same limitations. Apparently, from all the war footage in hot places, they can make these distinctions.

 

http://spectrum.ieee.org/mar06/3043

"BMW (and Honda, which offers the enhancement on its Legend luxury sedan, sold in Japan) has opted for far infrared technology, which detects energy farther up the infrared band that is emitted by objects as heat. This far infrared night vision is also called passive, because no special light source is required. The special camera these systems use—essentially a phased array of infrared detector elements analogous to the pixels in an ordinary digital camera—creates a temperature pattern called a thermogram, which is refreshed 30 times a second. The heat from a pedestrian or an animal is much greater than the heat coming to the camera from its surroundings.

A signal processor translates the thermogram data to an image suitable for display on a monitor. In the BMW, it shows up on the LCD screen in the center console normally used for its iDrive control system. In Honda's Legend, the night vision image appears on a display that pops up from the dashboard when the system is turned on. "

 

http://www.ivsource.net/modules.php?...article&sid=93

"Many were not happy with the image quality of the passive far-infrared system used in the Cadillac. The technology is basically thermal imaging and ambient air temperature made a big difference in performance – on warm nights the image quality was poor because there was so much thermal energy present.


Interestingly, the far-IR approach recently received a boost when Honda introduced a pedestrian-detecting night vision system on the Japanese market which was co-developed with Raytheon. However, the system only works below a defined temperature threshold of 30 degrees Celsius. The Honda system can be considered a second generation version of the Cadillac system, though, and the design differs in several ways. (See ” Gutsy Move -- Honda Introduces Night Vision with Pedestrian Detection,” IVsource, November 7, 2004.)

Honda’s system is about twice the price hat the Cadillac night vision system sold for. "

 

30 Celsius is 86 degrees F. in case anyone is temperature-conversion-challenged.

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