I love the potential of a digital dash.
I hate the wasted potential of actual digital dashes.Let me fuckin customize it.
Let me put whatever gauges I want wherever I want. I know that the data is available over the CAN bus, let me fuckin see it.
Dynamically change the layout if something important happens I need to keep an eye on, but wouldn’t normally need to worry aboutOn the canbus
Even more infuriating when not only is it not customisable, but they layout they do use is just… bad in a thousand different tiny ways.
For example, the tachometer and speedometer on my vehicle have two display modes. The traditional looking dials and a more compact vertical wheel that leaves more room in the middle of the display for other things.
…but those other things are almost always either useless (I don’t need to see a little picture of the vehicle I’m driving), or actively worse (the media info screen actually shows fewer characters in the larger mode).
It’s not unusable, it’s just varying levels of awkward or useless in dozens of little aspects.
My Seat Leon has a digital dashboard, by pressing the “VIEW” button on the steering wheel it rotates between several different layouts, which can be customized.
I normally just have two normal dials, with a GPS map in the middle, fuel gauges to the left (because the standard place doesn’t line up properly) and a media display to the right (shows what song/podcast is playing and the progress of it)
I can make my entire dash be a giant GPS map display, with only a small digital speedometer readout, but that is annoying.
These new digital dashboards offer plenty of customizations, but the formfactor should be the same as a normal dash
No idea what that bottom driver is doing, but it indeed does not spark joy
It’s a screenshot from MKBHD’s latest video.
Lmao, high beams, no seatbelt at 108kph for a 30kph speed limit. Ooof.
Is it detecting a car in front as well?
Wow, I didn’t even notice the displayed values
Gen Z: Can’t read analog clocks. “What speed am I going? There are no numbers!”
This one sparks joy.
So does this one.
This one (ETA: my '97 Prelude) sparks so much joy.
The best looking dials on a dashboard I have ever seen is the dashboard from the Saab 9000 CSE.
This isn’t exacty what I remember, but close enough:
I love the green and orange colors, the car diagram, the turbo, temp and fuel dials are just great.
Granted I was a kid when we had that car, but the colors were beautiful
I had a 97 prelude sh 5 speed. Great Lil car and a lot of fun to drive. But then I got my hands on an 02 s2000. Funnest car to drive I’ve ever owned.
That looks just like my Sunfire’s dash, other than mph being more prominent than km/h and it redlining over 7k rpm.
Is that an S2000?
I had an s2000. My redline was about 9000 rpm and the gauge cluster was lit up orange, but lit up in such a way that it didn’t really look like it was back-lit. It was an amazing gauge cluster.
Man, I miss my Sunfire so much it hurts my heart
Nope. 5th gen Honda Prelude.
Rad
There reason this one and the analogue dials spark joy is because there’s something tangible happening in front of us. Either needles are moving or lights are being lit.
The modern iPad display just feels… disconnected, I guess
🥵
Oh wow, what car is that!?
C4 Corvette!
Of course it doesn’t spark, is electric
she is a very small and cute little sandwich
Touch screens have no business in dashboards. I don’t care how sleek it looks to replace all the physical buttons. You have to look at a touch screen to use it. That alone makes them entirely unfit for the purpose. Physical buttons that can be identified by touch and provide tactile feedback are the only interfaces that make any fucking sense at all.
This fees like something so obvious that I cannot understand how we got here.
E: whoops wrong comment
You touch the gauges behind your steering wheel?
How else should a blind man know how fast he is travelling?
Got a hearty chuckle out of me.
There often is a button or too within the dash cluster to change things like the trip meter or cluster brightness
I am partial to the windshield projection style. It is truly fantastic for keeping your eyes on the road while seeing your speed
Don’t they sell add-on projector Huds which snake a wire down to OBD-ii port?
The two-tiered cluster of my Civic really grew on me. The speedometer is up really high so it’s almost always in your line of sight.
I’m dying for good windshield HUDs
Volkswagen has a pretty awesome one but it costs like 10k more for that level of trim.
I love my HUD, I’m currently driving a rental without one and I hate looking down at the speedo.
I get having a digital cluster, because you can display way more information than using analog gauges.
Put it in front of the driver.
Also, make the text bigger.
So many displays have tiny, hard to read text that could easily be twice as tall and wide without even impacting the blank space that separates them.
I’m looking at you, Tesla.
And the Volvo EX30.
I guess I’m in the minority: I prefer to see my speed as a number instead of a dial.
Yes, it does need to be in front of the driver.
Renault have been doing this for ages. I had a 2009 Mégane which gave the speed as a digital number. Fuel and oil temps were bars to either side. Revs was a physical dial.
It was such a great car, just a shame about the engineering…
An advantage of a proper dial is that you can instinctively see the change in speed by how quickly the needle moves.
108 in a 30. Someone speeding that much has no time for a ticket.
Someone speeding that much won’t be having much time left in general.
Marques Brownlee?
Speak for yourself. I’d love an easy to read screen.
I don’t understand how anyone can buy a Tesla. The lack of a dashboard + the only interface being a tablet alone are a deal breaker for me.
You’re being sold a feature that is really just massive cost cuttings playing impostor as a luxury feature at a premium with 100x worse usability.
If dial gauges weren’t what you chuckleheads grew up with (I’m 38 so I understand the nostalgia) you’d realize they aren’t really all that well designed. There’s no reason they go as high as they do, especially when they were “capped” at 85, and they display a terrible amount of information for the amount of space they take up.
I dislike many digital dashboards, not because they don’t interface well or they don’t look good, but because I can’t customize them to my own liking. I want my average speed, instantaneous speed, average miles per gallon, instantaneous miles per gallon, range, engine temperature, music track, outside temperature, inside temperature, tire pressure, time, vehicle orientation, all at once. They’re normally all available, but hidden in different menus and screens. Put it all out there, I’ll learn where to look for the info I want. And let people who desire less info have the ability to set up their dashboard for that as well.
A dial gauge can impart certain information that other ways cannot. I can notice a sudden change in movement without looking directly down, or see certain patterns of movement that simple numbers won’t. An old example of the loss of that was found in some classic luxury cars (my grandmother had a Cadillac that I noticed it in). The speedometer wasn’t a dial, it was an analog bar that would go right to left as your speed increased. It was very hard to judge change of speed by this, much like it’s hard to see from a few digital numbers that rapidly change. I’ve also noticed that even digital dial gauges can suffer from this if their refresh isn’t fast enough to simulate an analog accurately.
Doesn’t mean you can’t get used to a display or find other ways to get the same input, but dials aren’t just old nostalgia, they do have advantages. I would bet for some measurements an analog multimeter is preferred over a digital, and vise versa.
Dials and digital displays are like clocks, the position can relay a lot of additional contextual information that doesn’t come from a simple number.
Can you give examples?
Both clock and auto?
Because other than time, I’m having a hard time seeing what else a clock is telling you by being analogue.
You know how the shape or spacing of something can provide information?
An analogue clock makes it easy to glance at and see the difference between two times. If it is at 10 you can instantly know if you have two hours until midnight (or noon) because there are two hour spaces. If it says 10 you have to mentally calculate the two hours. If you want to do something in 15 minutes it is a lot easier to glance ahead the distance on the clock than to calculate 15 minutes from now based on a digital display.
The same thing is true for well designed analogue speedometers and tachometers. On my last car 75 mph was basically noon on the speedometer so I could see if I was going the right speed out of the corner of my eye because the line being vertical doesn’t require direct concentration. Same with the tach, I knew where 3500 rpm was to know when to shift when the music was too loud to hear the engine.
Both require some familarity of course. I actually had a pain learning how to read an analogue clock until an uncle explained how he used the spacing and then it clicked. Speedometers vary from car to car, so it takes getting used to a new one.
Both come down to how quickly we can recognize shapes and expected positions of things compared to reading numbers. My current vehicle has a digital speedometer and I hate it because I have to actively read it, can’t just glance at it like the old analogue displays.
The thing about a digital display is that you can have things display however you want. You want numbers? Fine. You want gauges? No problem. You want sliding bars and thermometer looking things? You got it. You want a time chart of values over time? Can do. You want an of the above at once? Got it.
In theory, anyways
Good luck getting an auto manufacturer to allow you to customise your dash lol
If they added the options to choose what to see it would be fantastic! Most don’t though.
Car manufacturers could’ve used the example of an aircraft. Their primary flight display shows speed nicely with current speed, good indication of changes in speed, settings like cruise control and max speed all in one clean display. I’d prefer that one. But no, it’s not even an option of course.
