As the meme says: “Always be yourself.” Unless you can be batman. So always be Batman. These are truly words to live by. The NV300 Max will help you get closer to the Dark Knight by allowing you to see in a spectrum other than visible light. I’ve driven a lot of cars with night vision and all of them have had trouble integrating. This one is no different, but there are pros and cons to the fact that it works on any car. Some are more polarizing than others.

I want to make it clear that I am testing a pre-production unit. By the time this is released, the Kickstarter program will be in full swing. I’ve looked at countless pre-production cars over my career with mixed results. Some were almost ready for production and if I hadn’t been told I wouldn’t have known they weren’t production releases. Others were so far in pre-production that they were throwing out trim pieces as they were being driven and entire systems weren’t working. This seems pretty close to production, although given my experience with anything computerized, I know that software updates are continuous throughout the life of any product and I’m sure that this is no different.

The essentials

This is the best automotive thermal imaging system I have ever used. It’s also the most affordable (that I’ve used) with a normal list price of $649.00, but if you get it Kickstarterit’s only $399.00. In luxury cars I’ve driven with integrated systems, this is normally an option for around $2,000. It picks up pedestrians, cyclists and animals. He can even distinguish them quite precisely. The NV300 Max thermal camera also provides forward collision warnings and has the ability to track other vehicles in front of you. It records images and will automatically save what it considers important if you don’t do it yourself. It works like a dashcam, but is more for the real-time use case.

Now let’s talk about the elephant in the room, or more specifically the dent on the roof of my car. I have a few neighbors who seem to enjoy bolting, gluing, adhering, or otherwise attaching all sorts of aftermarket items to their vehicles. Whether it’s land ladders, auxiliary lights, or the Corvette guy who just seems to buy a new sticker chrome part every month. I’m not like these people.

I don’t like extra stuff on the outside of my car. I have even debadged several of my cars in the past. I have a feeling that many of you can’t imagine having a plastic box, even a well-designed one, stuck to the roof of your car: the wiring is even harder to swallow.

Inside, not only is the screen out of keeping with the rest of the interior, but in the short time I tested the NV300 Max, I struggled to fit it into my feed driving work. I’m confident that if I took the time, I could integrate the cameras into the grille and they would be virtually invisible on the outside of the car. I could also do a much better job inside the car. Whether I could get to the point where I could use the screen inside the car without it being a distraction while driving is yet to be determined.

It wouldn’t look out of place on the tumbler

I wanted my NV300 Max installation to be as temporary as possible. That’s why you see duct tape to hold things in place. The roof camera unit has fairly strong magnets. But if you’re installing it on a car that you plan to leave on, there’s also 3M foam tape on the bottom. It’s the same material you use for spoilers and trim. Once lit, it will take some work to remove.

The kit also includes self-adhesive cable channels to route the cable over the roof and into the car. I chose to run it along the A-pillar, along the windshield, through the rain tray, and then back through the door pillar into the car. For something more permanent, once I got into the rain trap, I could have found a grommet that took me through the firewall. It would be much cleaner. I placed the screen in a storage tray in my dashboard. The aluminum stand has adhesive on the bottom and the screen is held on magnetically. Everything is powered by a plug in the 12V socket, and the instructions specifically say not to hardwire it. My wiring is atrocious, don’t be like me, put everything away.

The screen is also the control unit of the system. It is a 6.4-inch OLED touchscreen. If someone handed it to me and told me it was a new Android smartphone, I would believe them. It uses a USB-C connection in the display, but the other cables use small threaded pin and sleeve connectors. All the hardware seems well made and durable.

The Verdict: Using Bat Vision in the Real World

For the sake of accuracy: Batman, to be true to his namesake, uses sonar to see in the dark and map from a distance. “Yes, Mr. Wayne, like a submarine.” The NV300 Max uses both a standard visual camera and a vanadium oxide (VOx) thermal imaging sensor. The visual camera has a 120° while the thermal camera is 25° horizontal and 19° vertical. The visual system is large enough to function as a dashboard camera. Night vision is more focused to be effective in watching the road. And it’s very effective.

My neighborhood has sidewalks separated from the road by a row of trees. The NV300 Max thermal camera can spot pedestrians and dogs between trees. Not only do you see them as orange and yellow figures on the screen, but they are also highlighted by colored frames. This is the second part of what makes this unit so effective. It uses an AI processor (and yes, it hurts me more to type those two tortured letters than to read them) to determine what the heat signatures are. It recognizes cars and highlights them in different colors depending on the range. It’s not in literature, but it seems to recognize who is coming towards you rather than moving away. Honestly, seeing cars isn’t the important thing for me, this unit is all about pedestrians, cyclists and animals.

I had this device on my car for Halloween. He selected children in the park in costumes that one would assume would block their heat signature. It showed me small dogs running everywhere while my eyes only spotted an irresponsible pet owner with an off-leash pet. And, as I said earlier, this system works better than any I have used and installed from the factory.

There’s always a “but,” right? Even with the large screen sitting on the dash, I found it distracting to take my attention away from the road. I turned off the car highlighting and it helped a lot. This way the screen only highlights people and animals. They appear on the screen and you can see them out of the corner of your eye. At some point, augmented reality windshields will change the way we drive.

We also have to talk about the integration of the camera unit. Or maybe the lack of integration. For some, this won’t be a problem. If you already have antennas, mounts, lights, and everything else you can find on the off-road website hooked to your “rig”, what’s next? For those who have an aesthetic problem – that’s me – I’m sure I can remove the sensor assembly from the large housing and hide it in one of my grilles, or even put it in one of the fog light covers. I’m still not sure if there is a better way or place to mount the screen.

A heads-up display seems like a good idea. But I’ve used them in the past and you end up looking at the world through a phone-sized image while driving. Perhaps simply training yourself to watch for the color change on the screen and get a sense of how it compares to the real world is the answer.

It is an extremely useful tool. I have to imagine that people who live in more rural areas with wild animals would find this even more useful than me just checking out joggers with Labradoodles. I have no complaints about the value or quality; it may just take more work to find a good installation and, ultimately, just more time to learn how to use it properly while driving.