My 535xi has HUD and when I'm wearing polarized sunglasses the HUD is washed out by the polarizers. If I tilt my head to either side, I can see the display just fine. I'm wondering if there's a standard orientation for the polarizers in sunglasses (mine are clip-on to prescription glasses) or it if's a crap shoot to get the right ones?

 

Good luck... every pair of quality sunglasses distorts the HUD. Just deal with it

Oh, try turning up the brightness as that helps a little...

 

It it vitally important that the sunglasses polarization it oriented this way.

If it was rotated around you would get no protection from glare coming off the road or the bonnet/hood and during sunset/sunrise this can be a major safety issue.

Also helps with seeing the lines on the road during heavy rain.

I also don't like the effect on my HUD - the only thing I did was increase the brightness to maximum.

 

Of course the sunglass polarizer would need to be the way it is. Odd thing is BMW never compensated for it. Whatever lets you see the HUD if you tilt your head to one side could have been fixed with the hardware design for the projector. Meh, just live with it.

 

My 545i has this same issue with the HUD and sunglasses. BUT..... Brand new Mercedes vehicles have this problem as well, it's not just bmw.... Every time I PDI a new Benz with HUD, my polarized sunglasses make the HUD almost invisible during the road test. It's just a thing you've gotta deal with.

 

Funny thing - I've had this car for 5 years and never noticed the issue until now as I just started wearing sunglasses for driving due to issues with eyestrain. Frankly I find it interesting that an engineering company like BMW (or MB such as they are) wouldn't have figured out a way to make it work.

 

The problem would be that the system wouldn't work without sunglasses! I guess a switch for with or without sunglasses could be installed

 

I'm not sure this would be true. If the HUD display only passed vertically polarized light it would be visible without sunglasses or with them since polarized sunglasses filter out horizontally polarized light and allow vertically polarized light through by design.