A quick way to sum up the $350,000 Bentley Continental GT coupe is that it’s perception-warping. Sticker shock aside, it’s strange rolling around in something so big, luxurious, and supple, yet also has the ability to rip through a twisty road as capably as a sports car half its size. The Conti’s level of athleticism is not something you’d expect in something that weighs more than 5,000 lbs.
And yet, the warping doesn’t stop there. The new car market has made advanced driver assistance—like lane-keep assist and blind-spot monitoring—a commonplace for a few years. But recently, I experienced a whole other form of driver assistance offered in the Bentley Continental GT that I never had before: thermal imaging. And I found it truly fascinating.
This technology paints what we see in an entirely different light, and was fun to test while cruising around the streets of Los Angeles in peak opulence. Here’s how the British automaker’s thermal imaging system works, what it’s like to use, and how it could affect our concept of safety (for better or for worse).
Night Vision: A fitting proper noun
Bentley calls its thermal imaging system Night Vision, which is fitting since thermal imaging is common in some forms of conventional night vision systems. Fun coincidence: Bentley calls my test car’s silver color Moonbeam.
Thermal imaging is, simply put, a camera with sensors that pick up infrared light, or heat, from the electromagnetic spectrum and turn it into an image. On the flipside, conventional cameras and the human eye create images from visible light. It’s not entirely new, and has been in high-end luxury cars, but this was my first thorough interaction with the technology.
The image broadcasted on Bentley’s 12.3-inch instrument cluster is monochromatic—sorry, no room for Predator references here. The brighter the white light, the hotter it is. The camera is mounted behind the…
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