Free Candy For Everyone

I rented a car while I was out at GDC last week. It was not a good car. No. It was not. It was a Chevy Classic. I’d never heard of that before. At home, I drive an Infiniti G35x, which I’ve been enjoying for… wow… almost a year now. It’s fun fun fun. And definitely good in the snow and rain. Well, I went from my car to my uncle’s car. He let me drive his brand new BMW M5. Now that’s a crazy good car. It’s totally decked out with all the latest geek gadgets. The strangest thing I noticed as a driver is this roll control feature. If you’re stopped at a light and take your foot of the brake, you do not roll. That doesn’t sound all that weird, but it is, trust me. We all assume we’re gonna roll a bit. I could see how that would be really really nice for someone learning to drive stick. Heh. I remember how much I feared hills when I was learning stick. That was not good.

Anyway, the M5 even has a heads up display. There’s a little screen above the dash that somehow reflects onto the windshield. It’s really inobtrusive and can display your speed, or direction information from you navigation system so that you don’t have to look away from the road to see where you should go. It’s very scifi-future, and it’s very much nearly here. It’s not quite as cool as it will be. Right now it’s not in color, it’s just orange. And it uses the polarization properties of the windshield, which is made out of some special kind of glass, which means that if you have polarized sunglasses (which I do) you cannot see it through them. But soon, I can see it. It’ll be everyone and awesome.

Update: Here’s an image I found of the HUD. I didn’t actually see any info except the speed displayed, so I don’t know if it actually is in color like this pic shows, are if this is just a “simulated” picture.

So I went from that fantastic machine to the Chevy. In the rain. In rush hour traffic. I was driving it for 5 days, and by the end of the week I was finally used to the fact that it took that thing more than twice the distance it takes my car to stop. That is not fun. It was so nice to get home and get into my car. The brakes felt so ridiculously responsive. It was, and is, really really great. I love my car. Glad to be home…