Physical gauges? Meh, don't really care that much. Just as long as the data on the screen is clear and where it is expected to be. Physical buttons with physical feedback so they can be adjusted by feel while keeping eyes on the road? Those are important. Maybe they can be replaced with a voice interface at some point but I'd like to see a few more sigmas of reliability before relying on voice recognition to turn on the windshield wipers.
Tangent: I can't help but feel like we're automating away the driving experience - although most people probably never appreciated it.<p>There's a magical zenlike state of flow that feels like a seamless merging of man and machine, and personally I think it's much easier to cultivate with analog features which force you to think carefully about control, and it is important that a driver is occasionally allowed to exceed the limits of control. That means standard transmission, no traction control, and arguably even ABS could be done away with. This goes for information display as well - it's hard to describe the qualia that comes from glancing at a purpose built, mechanical indicator, that you know will always be in the same place. These things together combine to give a car a soul. I'm no Luddite but I have no desire to drive what amounts to a high tech robot.<p>Where's the joy in pressing the gas and having a car simply drive itself? Sure, for the vast majority, a car is a tool for transport from A to B. But I think many of these people are missing out on a unique experience.
Related: Mazda is removing screen from future vehicles due to the clear safety issues. <a href="https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-purging-touchscreens-from-its-vehicles" rel="nofollow">https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...</a>
I'm a big fan of an uncluttered instrument cluster, preferably with analogue gauges but I've seen some digital versions that are fine. The real problem seems to be the screens suffer the same fate as all software, adding gimmicks and superfluous information just because it's easy.<p>With a physical instrument cluster each gauge costs real money which enforces discipline on the design.
My RAM truck does have a tiny digital display that has a ton of functionality and I can read the tire pressure on all 6 tires. A lot of the standard stuff also has a secondary mechanical analog display too, because I purchased this truck in 2016. Of course, forget about tire pressure on those analog displays, that would be crazy complicated to have. The other thing, is the RAM display is not connected to the internet, so I don't have to worry about the menu changing locations or button order changing. What I got when I purchased will stay the same. That's comfortable.<p>How do I feel about EVERYTHING moving to a large LCD panel that could play Netflix if I really wanted? I think as long as manufacturers guarantee the interface won't change in very substantial ways since the purchase of the car, I would be OK with it. I would imagine that if the speed limit and engine temperature sudden swapped position, people would get into deadly car accidents very quickly. I know it's not that simple, but you have to realize we're talking about not just you, but 5-7 billion people that may have digital displays to worry about when they are driving. When you scale those UX mistakes, people will die.<p>So if updates and digital screens are on the way for all cars, I would recommend some basic rules for manufacturers to follow. (Of which I don't know what would be good but it should exist)
> Screens are also less likely to break than mechanically moving gauges<p>What? If you buy a 30 year old car, the gauges are most likely still intact, and original. If you have an older house, things like the water gauges (or even regular clock gauges) are also decades old. I want to see the screen that will work for > 20 years in a constantly moving and vibrating environment, under massive temperature changes, without any additional care or repairs or replacement.<p>Take passenger information displays in public transit. Not until a few years ago, it was still common that the head signs in trains, buses or subways where mechanical. It was often just a paper roll [0] that was adjusted to display the correct destination, or even just a plate that was changed by the conductor [1]. Things like car numbers or seat reservations were displayed by simple paper signs. Fast-forward to the 90ies, where at least in Europe, they began to replace these things by LCDs. After a few years, it was normal to see trains with broken head signs, broken car numbers, and broken reservation systems [2]. Fast-forward to today, where it is now en vogue to use full-fledged displays everywhere. The result (at least in the towns I use public transportation) are regularly broken displays [3] [4] [5] that even when they work, often offer no advantage over LCD or LED or even mechanical display from a passenger perspective. They just look more modern. Add to this that the display software is mostly some variant of Windows with a poorly built and designed web application running on it.<p>Think of all the people, all the knowledge, all the hours, all the resources and all the energy required to build and run a full-fledged high-resolution display, an operating system, the web application and a central server in the vehicle running those displays - all to replace a simple roll of paper <i>with a less reliable solution</i>! As computer scientists and software developers, this is what pays us - but as soon as the rest of the society realizes what is going on, I fear that there will a massive backlash.<p>[0] <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/2009-08-19-obus-eberswalde-by-RalfR-03.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/2009-08-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Wupper-Expresszugschild.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Wupper-E...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://soscheescho.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/wirre-anzeige-am-bahnhof.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://soscheescho.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/wirre-anze...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/06/33/aa/0633aa8ad996cfeb793672266cc99f44.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.pinimg.com/originals/06/33/aa/0633aa8ad996cfeb7936...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/33/a0/b7/33a0b7ac6e5563f48f668aaa10cb2c8e.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.pinimg.com/originals/33/a0/b7/33a0b7ac6e5563f48f66...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DkI_ZEbXsAEcknf.jpg:large" rel="nofollow">https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DkI_ZEbXsAEcknf.jpg:large</a>
In a similar vein, I was always a little bummed that Ambient Devices or some competitor never got more traction in the market, and never got much cheaper.<p>I thought they’d gone out of business but they are still alive and kicking. Unfortunately most of their devices no longer look much like gauges. Most look like clocks.
I’d never driven a car where the gauges bothered me, so I didn’t worry about it when buying a 2019 minivan to replace my 2006 Prius. I hate the screen. The clock isn’t always displayed! And it displays in multiple places! I just don’t use the radio because it’s too many taps to be safe while driving.
I saw some video of the inside of the crew console for the SpaceX capsule. It's all touch screens as far as I can tell.<p>That seems to me to be incredibly stupid. I'm sure it'll be very easy to access those controls when it's shaking violently and (heavens forbid) the entire capsule gets smoke-filled in an emergency.<p>I'm sure they've thought about these things, so I'm curious as to what I've missed.
Going in the other direction, there's a pretty good YouTube channel called amstudio that shows how to hook up physical gauges to your computer for use in racing simulators. IIRC, they've even taken out entire instrument panels from cars and interfaced them to the simulator.
There's an entire book making essentially the same point: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Best-Interface-No-brilliant-technology/dp/0133890333" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Best-Interface-No-brilliant-technolog...</a>
Indeed, gauges are so much better than digit-based displays, just as dial watch faces can be usefully read at a glance. When your attention is supposed to be on the road, knowing your speed is close to the posted limit is more useful than parsing your precise speed.
On the note: does anyone know about some actual studies that measured information registering speed on gauges VS written numbers? I'm still kind of puzzled about it and cannot reliably say, when reading a number is faster than evaluating a gauge.
There really are too many screens. I was driving a BMW SUV recently and switching the multimedia input to my phone and then connecting Bluetooth etc required going through so my screens. It'd be one thing if the navigation mechanism were easy/intuitive, but it's not. At the same time, there's so much functionality that cars now have and it's only increasing so I'm not sure how gauges can really help. It feels like what's needed is a built in iPad almost which at least has simple touch navigation.
My boss showed me the screen on his new 2019 vehicle. He had been complaining about it for weeks, and all I could think was "OK boomer, how bad could it be". Well it was beyond terrible. The number of clicks (I guess touches is the proper term) was crazy. To do ANYTHING it was like 5 menus deep. All I could think is the people that designed this thing HATE their users. I still drive a 2010 that's mostly gauges. Not looking forward to the upgrade.
I don’t mind the displays being screens as long as certain things have mechanical buttons. Eg: The AC/Max AC. Don’t make people go through touchscreen menus that take a minute just to boot. When it’s 100F outside and you need max ac, that minute is a LONG minute.