Make your highway driving experience safer with this lane-changing laser beam idea from a dystopian future video game!

, , , ,

Background:

The video game Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a dystopian corporate future where life is cheap, but it (surprisingly) features a courteous automotive safety feature.

Specifically, some flying vehicles in this setting will project a red “Warning: vehicle is landing here!” grid onto the street before descending, so that no one is crushed by a landing hover-car. How thoughtful!

Proposal:

It’s a bit strange that this “highlighted danger zone” idea does not exist in the real-world dystopian corporate present, since it seems like it would also work perfectly for non-flying cars.

Let’s consider the current state of the turn signal (Figure 1): it just generally indicates that a car may be either changing lanes or turning. We then must rely on other drivers to use situational awareness to predict where the lane-changing car will actually be moving.

Fig. 1: The turn signal (A.K.A. blinker) is “fine,” but it could use some improvement.

If the turn signals were replaced by a laser-projected danger zone (Figure 2), then nearby drivers would be able to easily discern where a lane-changing car is moving. This would reduce the chance of some other car trying to occupy this same section of road while the lane change occurs.

Fig. 2: The area that the driver wants to change lanes into is indicated here. As the car moves over to the right, the projector can “cut off” the left part of the grid (so the grid will appear to remain stationary on the road, instead of sliding over to the right).

Minor Complication:

This system would probably work great for lane-changing on a highway. However, for an actual turn, the car wouldn’t be moving laterally, so the laser grid would be misleading.

Fortunately, the fix is simple: the grid should only appear when the driver pushes the turn signal stalk halfway (“lane change”), and not when the driver pushes the stalk all the way (for a “real” turn).

PROS: Could legitimately be a useful car safety feature.


CONS: The projection might not be easily visible in bright sunlight.

Originally published 2026-09-07.