If you’re from a small town you know what it’s like to get stuck behind a massive truck on the one-lane road you’ll be on for the next 40 miles. Maybe you’ve even pulled that dumbass move where you slam on the gas and blindly try to pass the truck, hoping you make it in time before something comes barreling toward you out of nowhere. 

Augmented reality in the cars of the future could make that a problem of the past. So believe researchers from the University of Porto in Portugal, led by professor Michel Ferreria, who have been developing a technology that lets drivers see right through the vehicle in front of them like a superhero with X-ray vision.

The idea is simple: Big vehicles have a webcam on the windshield that is live-streaming footage to a LCD screen on yours. A little box appears over your windshield that shows you what they see. 

The technology, called See-Through System, has been tested in a driving simulator and on the road. It was presented at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality this month. Researchers say it will be in use in the “near future,” but not until car-to-car communication becomes more common. That’s not too far off either: Groups testing inter-vehicle transmission predict cars will be “talking” to each other within the next five years—sending each other data about their their location, direction, speed, and so on.

It’s all supposed to make driving safer. But relying on wirelessly transmitted video footage to be your eyes on the road seems terrifying if you ask me. What if the transmission cuts out? Or malfunctions? Or the damn webcam falls off? Not to mention that at this point, there’s still a 200-millisecond delay in the footage, so the objects in your augmented reality windshield are further away than they seem.

Still, it’s all but inevitable that windshields will soon be virtually enhanced hybrid screens. We already rely on our smartphone to tell us where the next gas station is and if there’s traffic up ahead and everything in between. Merging the physical world is surely the future of transportation. At least, until self-driving cars take over and cut us fallible humans out entirely.