Drive the New BMW X3… on Mars

While I think it’s critical to take any vehicle you’re considering for an actual test drive, it’s kind of fun to see the sorts of things that automakers are starting to do with virtual reality to give people a small taste of what their vehicles are like. But in the case of BMW, they’re not only letting you take their new X3 for a virtual spin, but to do it on Mars.

Using CGI and 360º video tech, you can sit right there at your computer and see what it might be like if you took the BMW X3 crossover for a spin on the red planet. The 3-minute video is designed to show off some of the vehicle’s safety and semi-autonomous driving systems, but it’s really just more fun than anything else.

After watching this, I think somebody needs to make a video game where you can race versions of real cars on other worlds, and let you play with things like the planets’ atmosphere and gravity to see how that affects things. While we wait for that, we’ll have to settle for this in the mean time…