Anyone who wears polarized sunglasses should know that they can make things look a bit screwy once inside a car. Window tint can look like it has squares imprinted in it, colorful in-dash displays can get a little psychedelic and head-up displays can completely disappear.
Because of this, I avoided polarized sunglasses for years. As I was constantly testing different cars from different manufacturers, I couldn’t have my sunglasses throwing an unnecessary personal variable into reviewing a car. Besides, my non-polarized Oakleys were just fine for the California sun. I also didn’t want every other review I wrote to have a Con of “instruments disappear with polarized sunglasses” – something that always irked me when Patrick Bedard would review something for Car and Driver. And if memory serves me right, BMW was often in his crosshairs for radio displays that would disappear when wearing his polarized sunglasses.
Which is all why a PR pitch from BMW Eyewear caught my attention. Apparently, they have something called Vi/ON lenses that contain a special polarized filter produced by Dalloz Creations that supposedly prevents in-car displays from distorting or disappearing altogether. Sounds like a game changer, especially for head-up displays, which continue to suffer the most from polarized sunglasses despite all-digital gauge clusters and other interior displays being generally impervious nowadays. Indeed, I once drove a Kia Stinger for four hours before I took off my polarized sunglasses (yes, I eventually made the plunge) and discovered the thing had a HUD beaming info onto the windshield the entire time. Some HUDs are better than others in this regard, but all suffer to some extent with polarized sunglasses.
