Does anyone have a fully non-mechanical instrument cluster in their car?

[Sal Ammoniac]

I absolutely can't relate to those results. I drive very much per year and I WAY prefer my old, completely analog Volvo 940 instrument cluster over any digital display.

I'm the exact opposite. I WAY prefer an all-digital display and dislike antique analog displays.

[james_s]

The difference between 31 and 32 MPH on my analogue gauge is less than 1mm. Do you really think people can quickly assess a spacings like that  as they glance down? To read my digital gauge I only have to register a couple of 3cm high digits. The analogue dial may be good for trends, but for following a precise speed to lock yourself to the speed limit, they are very unsatisfactory. I would really like to see some statistics for accident rates on roads with speed cameras. I suspect people are looking away from the road to check their speed far more often than they otherwise would, which has to be bad for safety.

Is a cop there going to give you a ticket for going 32 in a 30 zone? That would never happen here, unless they were really looking for an excuse to pull you over. Generally as long as you're not more than 5 over you won't get bothered so this is not really an issue. It's the old analog vs digital multimeter debate, digital is more precise, analog is typically better for relative and rate of change measurements. I don't mind digital speed indications but I prefer analog, not everyone does and that's fine.

[james_s]

I absolutely can't relate to those results. I drive very much per year and I WAY prefer my old, completely analog Volvo 940 instrument cluster over any digital display. To check the Speed I just glance down for a few msecs and decide that the needle is about right. back up with the vision to see where I'm driving.

The Volvo 940 is a wonderful car, glad to see a few of them still on the road. My daily driver is a 740 Turbo wagon which is a very close relative to the 940, practically identical, I'm not even sure why they made two entirely different series. I'm constantly amazed at its versatility, I have hauled lumber, furniture, fullsized standup arcade games, so many boxes of stuff that on one occasion a friend remarked that it was like unloading a clown car with what seemed like an impossible number of boxes just kept coming out. I've hauled 3 passengers along with myself and enough camping gear for all of us in comfort, the interior is cavernous with the squared off shape being ideal for maximizing internal space relative to exterior size. With big windows and narrow pillars it offers superb visibility all around, it has more ground clearance than a lot of the fake SUVs (crossovers) that are all the rage these days, fuel economy is fairly comparable to a modern crossover, the real world safety record is legendary and on top of all that it drives like a mild sports car and has a really unique and classic look. I'd buy a dozen more of them if I had somewhere to keep them. Anyway on the original topic I find the instrument cluster to be very nice, the cluster in the 850 my mom has is even nicer.

Whenever I drive a modern car I'm always struck by how horrible the visibility is, windows are tiny, pillars are enormous, the absurdly high beltlines make me feel like I'm peering out through tiny gun slits in an armored tank and they make the car look like an old geezer with his pants pulled up to his armpits. The poor visibility is downright dangerous, blind spots big enough to fit a whole car in, I don't know how anyone can consider that safe. Yes cars have increased the survivability of accidents but I would prefer to increase the chances of avoiding the accident in the first place by having good visibility. Trying to make up for all these shortcomings we have all these nagging electronic gadgets and band-aids that make the driving experience almost intolerable and people have this idea of a "clean" dash layout which means all the controls I want to use being hidden away, buried in menus on touchscreens. Another peeve of mine is the fad of having gigantic rims with tiny little rubber band tires which not only looks stupid IMO but results in a harsh and unpleasant ride, they are fragile, easily damaged and expensive. I don't drive on a race track, I drive on real world roads that are full of potholes, bumps and debris.

If you want examples of good design, look at aircraft, they are for the most part immune to styling fads.

[james_s]

Cars all look the same because they're shaped by the same requirements. Decades ago we didn't care about passenger or pedestrian safety or mileage. When you design for those three plus a few others you inevitably end up with very similar solutions. Another factor is that due to the increased cost of designing a car you need to service a larger market which inevitably leads to common denominator designs. Exterior size and costs are tuned to service as many customers as possible.

The stifling over-regulation of the auto industry is certainly part of it, but I think the latter is responsible for most of the current mess. This article sums it up pretty well, I think he hit the nail on the head:

https://medium.com/swlh/the-zombie-mobile-b03932ac971d

And car companies wonder why millennials by and large aren't into cars, I wouldn't be into cars either if all I had to choose from was the bland homogenized shitboxes on the market today.

[coppice]

The difference between 31 and 32 MPH on my analogue gauge is less than 1mm. Do you really think people can quickly assess a spacings like that  as they glance down? To read my digital gauge I only have to register a couple of 3cm high digits. The analogue dial may be good for trends, but for following a precise speed to lock yourself to the speed limit, they are very unsatisfactory. I would really like to see some statistics for accident rates on roads with speed cameras. I suspect people are looking away from the road to check their speed far more often than they otherwise would, which has to be bad for safety.

Is a cop there going to give you a ticket for going 32 in a 30 zone? That would never happen here, unless they were really looking for an excuse to pull you over. Generally as long as you're not more than 5 over you won't get bothered so this is not really an issue. It's the old analog vs digital multimeter debate, digital is more precise, analog is typically better for relative and rate of change measurements. I don't mind digital speed indications but I prefer analog, not everyone does and that's fine.

There are no rules for this. There have been reported discussions in the last couple of years among UK police officers, which some saying everyone even 1MPH over the limit should be prosecuted, while others says that's just persecuting the public and not contributing to road safety. You just don't know what might happen if you don't stick solidly to the limit. The way the instruments in a car are now required to be calibrated means you should be able to rely on the gauge not under reporting your speed, unless there is a fault.

[james_s]

I mean technically the limit is the limit and it would be prudent to go a bit under. In the real world this is likely to trigger road rage from the guy behind you though. Either way I don't think analog or digital makes any difference here, I've never seen a speed limit like 31 MPH, it's always a round number that falls squarely on one of the major divisions on a speedometer scale. It's very easy to tell at a glance if you're going exactly 30 MPH or just a hair under or over because there's a big bold line on the scale at 25, 30, 35, etc.

[SiliconWizard]

Is a cop there going to give you a ticket for going 32 in a 30 zone?

A cope nope, but automated radars, yes! I dunno if you have them over there - if not, consider yourself lucky. In Europe, we are just invaded with those.

[Mr. Scram]

Fortunately, speed limits almost always correspond to the graduations of the dial, so the "am I at the right speed" is basically "is the pointer on the mark", far easier to see and more useful than the numerical value.

Not to mention calibration isn't exact pretty much by design. If going a millimetre over the mark gets you a ticket you were cutting it too close anyway. And again seeing the trend allows you to be more precise than whole numbers are flipping back and forth.

[Mr. Scram]

Is a cop there going to give you a ticket for going 32 in a 30 zone? That would never happen here, unless they were really looking for an excuse to pull you over. Generally as long as you're not more than 5 over you won't get bothered so this is not really an issue. It's the old analog vs digital multimeter debate, digital is more precise, analog is typically better for relative and rate of change measurements. I don't mind digital speed indications but I prefer analog, not everyone does and that's fine.

Numerical displays aren't more precise. They reduce the resolution significantly as they almost always round off to whole numbers.

[tooki]

I'm not so sure those actually are steppers. Old tech is still used because it works and you don't need to fix what isn't broken. It's a super high contrast display that won't fade and dead reliable. We'll see in about two decades how electronic displays fare but it'd surprise me if they turn out to be as reliable.

We don't have to speculate, given that the first (production) cars with digital dashboards are now over 40 years old! (The very first was in 1976.) I'm not a vintage car guy at all, so I actually don't know how they've held up, but in any event, this is an entirely knowable bit of information. Even if we just restrict it to graphical LCDs, we still already have cars over 20 years old.

You won't see purely digital (numeric) critical gauges in aviation/aerospace as an example.
Dial gauges are superior where you need fast reaction to the value and the trend, and sunlight readability.
Segmented bar graphs have such low resolution that trends are hard to make out.

I assume you're talking about the layout, not the technology? Cuz all-digital cockpits ("glass cockpits") have been around for a long time now. They just use graphical color displays to draw dials now.

[SparkyFX]

For UN/ECE harmonized vehicles, there is a defined lead of at least 4 km/h (Annex 3) and not more than 10% + 4 km/h the speedometer has to have to accommodate tire wear and other conditions (tire pressure, temperature, whatnot).

And cops do have to apply tolerances in their measurements to your favor. Some attorneys make a living from questioning the measurement protocols and such (e.g. was the laser gun properly in a straight line to the street, all filled out properly).

[Mr. Scram]

We don't have to speculate, given that the first (production) cars with digital dashboards are now over 40 years old! (The very first was in 1976.) I'm not a vintage car guy at all, so I actually don't know how they've held up, but in any event, this is an entirely knowable bit of information. Even if we just restrict it to graphical LCDs, we still already have cars over 20 years old.

I assume you're talking about the layout, not the technology? Cuz all-digital cockpits ("glass cockpits") have been around for a long time now. They just use graphical color displays to draw dials now.

The digital displays in older cars were often dreadfully unreliable but those can't really be compared to what's fitted to cars nowadays. They're a world apart. Maybe aircraft could provide some data but I'm fairly sure those displays are manufactured to different standards.

[rawrs]

'04 Holden Calais. I have the option of both, so, you tell me.

P.S. I had a passenger take the photo (albeit having to get very friendly to do so), because a friend who's equally nuts about cars thought I was bullshitting when I said my car basically idles at any speed. One of these days I'll get a GoPro so I can look nuts behind the wheel a bit more easily.

May also be worth pointing out that even modern semi-mechanical dashes are completely electrical, the cluster has a single loom and that's it. I don't believe there are even any signal wires anymore, it all goes through the ECU (and/or gearbox/mechatronics module, if you have one (GMs etc generally don't), since ultimately VSS comes from the gearbox and is used for a surprising amount of things) and/or body module first, the cluster just receives a single chunk of data that is sent out to every module in the car. Basically it's a multicast, a packet is sent out once and every module on the bus can choose to either do something with it or drop it. This *significantly* reduces loom complexity and wire count. You can have two or four (low/high speed CAN/ALDL/GMLAN/whatever) signal wires shared between every single module in the car, and that's it.

There's barely half a dozen wires in these clusters, from memory it's: high speed ALDL (think RS-232 but at a different signalling voltage) Tx/Rx, 5v, maybe 12v, and ground(s) - that's it. So much better than all the 90s pre-OBD crap. Even LED brightness is a command nowadays, as a pure guess (I haven't really looked into it), I think the BCM has an input that can be pulled high or low, or simply has button inputs, and this translates to a command that gets sent to relevant modules. No flakey resistors to burn out. I really have no idea why people think modern cars are complicated. They're screamingly easy when everything is broken down into little chunks.

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, though, and I'm sure I'm wrong about something. CANbus/OBD (which my car shouldn't run but kinda sorta yeah maybe does anyway) is a topic of significant interest to me, because it meshes two of my favourite things - cars and silicon. It's a fun little rabbit hole to tunnel down, and this is coming from someone who has no business liking old cars (like 50's old) as much as I do.

I'll shut up now, sorry for the waffle, and the edits. Can you tell this stuff interests me? Please do correct anything I have to say, because I'm a massive noob both electronically and (somewhat) mechanically, and both are things I want to learn more about, just don't really know how, beyond bumblefucking around in the garage.

[Ysjoelfir]

attached picture

I have to say that this would be an ideal instrument cluster. It combines the quick check functionality of an analog meter with the accuracy of a digital one. One can choose what to look at.
Why isn't this more common?

[Rerouter]

Rawrs, Its a Holden VY/VZ, it has an analog speed and RPM input, and is mostly self contained, Its the other way around, it actually stores a bunch of the ECU settings in the cluster, e.g. the lighting curves, if the daytime running lights are on etc,

There method at the time was they could reconfigure the ECU between low series and high series options by swapping the cluster at the dealership, but it never really became a thing in Aus,

I actually have most of the programming options mapped out for that cluster. if you want to turn on / off things, or alter the redline settings.

[mac.6]

Both the resolution of analogue gages and the ability to spot trends on them is better which makes them more suitable for adhering to speed limits.

What trend? speed or tachy trend is driven by accelerator, if you're unable to detect your foot trend then the problem is not the cockpit.
My car have both analog style display and digital speedometer, I tend to look only at the digital one.

Instrument cluster software is interesting (some of my coworker work on it). It requires safety inspected code as when an alert is received, it must be displayed whatever the condition (ie, tire pressure alert, ECU error, ABS/ESP kick-in...). So they have to use fancy os like green hills and so on, while maintaining constant 30/60fps on the display...

[Mr. Scram]

What trend? speed or tachy trend is driven by accelerator, if you're unable to detect your foot trend then the problem is not the cockpit.
My car have both analog style display and digital speedometer, I tend to look only at the digital one.

Instrument cluster software is interesting (some of my coworker work on it). It requires safety inspected code as when an alert is received, it must be displayed whatever the condition (ie, tire pressure alert, ECU error, ABS/ESP kick-in...). So they have to use fancy os like green hills and so on, while maintaining constant 30/60fps on the display...

It seems you're suggesting your foot position corresponds to a certain speed while in reality it's obviously a feedback loop. Having trend data added to the speed readout improves loop stability. An analogue style display shows you whether you're accelerating and how fast. The resolution of a numerical display is much lower and it's essentially impossible to maintain a regular speed without alternating between two or more numbers as the rounded number obfuscates any trend or detail. It's possible to change speed without changing the readout.