BackGadgets galore as new cars show off
Gadgets galore as new cars show off
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Want to feel like James Bond in the Capital?
Then you might beg, borrow, or steal a chance to sit in the driver’s seat of the new BMW 650i coupe, and turn on the thermal imaging camera.
Yeah, you heard right. Thermal imaging. It lights up warm objects ahead of the car up to 300m, more than twice as far as the headlights, and helps the driver avoid pedestrians. “Or cows," quips Stephen Bock, a product manager at Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW).
To help keep your eye on the road, and not on the DVD-compatible screen in the dashboard which will one day show you satellite-enabled maps, there’s the heads-up display; in-floating letters projected on to the windshield by lasers, so you can see your speed and directions without having to look down at the guages.
Seems fancy but not as fancy as the refrigerator in the backseat of the 750li, also on display at the Auto Expo.
Also in the backseat of that car, which easily costs more than a crore, is your own LCD TV for DVDs, and when you’re really bored, “you can get Doordarshan," Abhay Bhange, a spokesperson, referring to the state-run TV channel.
For the serious, or lazy, driver, there’s the dynamic drive, which adjusts how sensitive your power steering is depending on the speed of your car.
And yet, the one common question repeated everywhere had nothing to do with luxury.
“Have you seen the new Tata car," they asked, intrigued by the Tata Nano, a car that costs almost 1/100th of the wares they were peddling.
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