supralance

Legality or morality aside, how do you modify the car so I can use the night vision with the headlights off? Is it possible?

Nuru

buy a FLIR camera (~$3500), wire/connect it into the Comand (aux input, i think), use it instead of the MB system.

ItalianJoe1

Pretty sure the night vision relies on infrared from it's own sensor, so in theory, you could wire in a switch to kill power to the lights and the rest of it would still work.

DaveW68

If you can find a way to get it to work, it is highly likely that you won't be able to see hardly anything without it working in conjunction with the headlights. Night Vision is a mostly worthless gimmick anyway. If mine stopped working, I wouldn't miss it one bit.

Nuru

Dave is definitely correct, the MB system requires the headlights to work. If it was an indpendent FLIR camera, it would not need the headlights. I was thinking of retrofitting, and I asked MB directly and they stated it only works with the specific headlights that are installed on cars with this option, regular headlights don't work with their camera, from what they say. i believe the headlights have infrared emitters that illuminate the road for their camera. Without those emitters in the headlights, you will need to generate infrared emissions with something else. in this 2009 video when MB first rolled it out, the reviewer clearly stated at ~ 3:00 of the video, that the infred bulb in the headlights are required to be on or you won't see anything on the screen.



From 2011

FLIR
http://www.flir.com/home/news/details/?ID=86223

dlafever

Well, the emitters in the headlights are required (inboard of the true hi/low beams on cars with Night Vision.) It should be possible to (really thinking there's dubious value in doing this) disconnect the HID bulbs and only use the infrared emitters along the with the night vision camera. Secret squirrel style.