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 aboutEven 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
This one sparks joy.
Rad
This one (ETA: my '97 Prelude) sparks so much joy.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
Basically nobody actually needs a tach taking up as much space as the speedometer.
RIP anyone that drives a manual, tows, or goes off roading.
On a more serious note I’d imagine they stick around for diagnostics and inclement weather(forcing the car into a particular gear). Since the space is already there they generally have a bunch of other gauges and crap inside of them (all the warning lights that are usually off).
I mean, if you actually need an indicator, a shift light and a line of LEDs gets the job done better than a tach anyway, besides I’ve driven manuals that didn’t even have a tach from the factory, it used to be pretty common. I’m pretty sure they stick around now because they make the car feel more sporty.
About the only time I actually needed the tach specifically was… I actually legitimately can’t think of one, nearly everything is by sound/feel and the times I needed specifics, like when troubleshooting, I would use an obd tool / tuner to see the exact values and plot them.
I am not an off-road guy, but I drove a stick and towed heavy stuff forever. You don’t need the tach if you have experience or ears. If you can’t drive manual without a tach, you’re a shit driver frankly.
The only reason I’ve ever used a tach is for break-in on a vehicle or for hypermiling.
Edit: before I went electric in 2017 and haven’t looked back :)
Once you have experience yeah…I rarely look at the tach anymore. It’s the process of acquiring that experience that it’s still useful also stuff gets loud or your driver might be deaf. Just helped my sister do something and part of the reset procedure on her car was hold 2000 rpm for 60 seconds. They serve a purpose is all.
Oh yeah it’s worth having a tachometer, but I don’t know why you want one that takes up as much space as the speedometer on the gauge cluster. It seems gratuitous to me.
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.
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
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.
I love a digital speedometer but dials as back up feel important
It does spark more though
Does it spark as much as a Star Trek high-tech panel?
If not, it’s not futuristic enough.
