Halloween: trick or treat technology in cars

We’re going to explain five of the latest and most mesmerising automotive bells and whistles, then use this timely Halloween motif to let you know whether they’re a treat (actually useful), or a trick (basically useless). See, good eh? Here goes then.

The Taycan's comfort entry feature lifts the car by three inches when you open the door, in theory making it a bit easier to get into what is a very ground-hugging Porsche. Watching the car’s body jump up those few inches is a genuinely impressive thing to behold, but it’s the definition of a party trick. Does it actually make the car any easier to climb into? Not really.

Result: trick

Parking cameras are nothing new, but ‘invisible bonnet’ is arguably the best development in parking camera tech since the bird’s eye view. (One of my parental highlights is the time I convinced my kids that top-down parking cameras are achieved by an actual satellite following each car from space.) Anyways, invisible bonnet gives drivers a real-time graphic of their wheels on the road, making it much easier to avoid scraping your alloys along the kerb. Nissan and Land Rover both offer the tech.

Result: treat

The idea of using a rear-view mirror as a digital screen for a rear-view camera seems utterly ridiculous. It's the 'make a pen that works in space when a pencil works fine' thing, innit? But with a car full of people, and/or luggage piled high, a standard rear-view mirror is only good for one thing: looking at those people and that stuff. Flick the switch at the bottom of a Land Rover ClearSight mirror to activate the rear camera and, voila! People and stuff bypassed; vision restored.

Result: treat

'Solarbay' might sound like a rubbish caravan park, but it's actually the world's greatest sunroof; we’ve come a long way since the days when having a small, manually retractable window pane in the roof was the height of automotive luxury. Renault's innovation is a glass panel that can change opacity at your command. It works using voice control. It’s a novelty really – a complicated alternative to sticking a roller blind underneath a sheet of glass – but it’s proper impressive all the same. The coolest roof this side of Santa’s bungalow.

Result: trick

Mercedes-Benz was the first to bring augmented reality navigation to market (we think), but a few other carmakers offer it now, including Skoda, Hyundai and Nissan. The original Mercedes system overlayed navigation guidance onto camera footage on the nav screen, basically making instructions clearer. But more modern systems, like Skoda's, incorporate it into the head-up display, pointing you to exactly where you need to be without your eyes ever leaving the road ahead.

Result: treat

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