Life-saving technology saves the lives of rich people in fancy cars the first couple years before it becomes affordable enough to go on mainstream cars. Examples: anti-lock brakes, airbags, stability control. Is night vision poised to become the next affordable lifesaver? Yes and no. The next generation of night vision technology has the potential to bring the price down to $1,000, which is still not cheap for something that protects pedestrians and jaywalking wildlife more the car occupants. Perhaps more importantly, Autoliv, the creator of one of the night vision systems, has figured a way to extend the range while being able to identify pedestrians and issue a visual alert. AutoLiv isn't talking specifics, but I expect it will be on the next generation BMW 7 Series later this year.

AutoLiv partners with Flir Systems, maker of the infrared imager, to create night vision systems for cars. The AutoLiv system uses far infrared (or passive IV) technology which, in plain old English, means it sees a long way in the dark and picks up the heat from people, animals, rocks that warmed in the sun all day, and car exhausts, out to about 300 meters, soon to be 500 meters. It pioneered in the U.S. on BMW's 5 Series, 6 Series, and 7 Series models and currently costs $2,200. A competing system used by Mercedes-Benz employs near-infrared or active IR technology, which illuminates the road ahead with infrared lighting and provides a photorealistic image, but only out to about 150 meters. Autoliv says the second-generation sensor narrows the angle from 36 to 34 degrees, employs a finer production process (25 microns vs. 38 microns), and continues with 320-by-200 resoloution. The result is a device which has a look-ahead range of about five seconds at highway speeds vs. three seconds.

In a video demo, Autoliv shows a poorly lit road using the old and then new systems. Not only is the range improved but the system looks for shapes with human-like characteristics: torsos, headings, moving arms and legs. In the demo, a yellow rectangle surrounds each identified pedestrian. So a jogger shows up more quickly than someone riding a skateboard, but both show up. (Animal recognition comes next.) Each automaker decides how to process the alerts: just the highlighted boxes, a visual indicator, or a warning beep (which would quickly become annoying).

Best of all, says Stuart Klapper, managing director of Autoliv's Night Vision operation in Goleta, Calif. (near Santa Barbara), "the cost of night vision is now about half what it used to be." That's their cost. Whether automakers will pass along the savings remains to be seen.

Klapper formerly worked for Raytheon, provider of the night vision systems that went into GM cars such as Cadillac beginning in 2000. Conventional wisdom has it that the technology was seen as something for old people, because of the choice of cars it went into. Klapper says, from his perspective, that it was wildly popular, so much so that demand was nearly four times as great as GM estimated, and even by ramping up production, half the customers who wanted night vision couldn't get it.