No, the top one sparks gasoline. And the bottom one sparks … I don’t know how electric cars work.
This one sparks joy.
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
Also, a digital display may be quicker to read a value, but an analog dial is infinitely superior for displaying both range and rate of change, which for rapid readouts is much more significant.
This one sparks so much joy.
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.
I think the Prelude’s cluster is great for a manual daily driver. And I think that for a track car, they nailed it with the S2k’s cluster.
I had an auto Prelude as a kid. I traded it in 2015 for a CVT HR-V and regretted it ever since. I always told myself if I got another, I’d hold out for a manual. So getting to own another is really meaningful to me.
I’d love to get to drive an AP1 at least once, though.
Nope. 5th gen Honda Prelude.
Man, I miss my Sunfire so much it hurts my heart
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 have two thoughts.
Damn thats beautiful and Saab as in the guys who made jets for various European nations during the cold war? Is this a Toyota situation where they make cars as well as military equiptment.
SAAB Automobile is the company that built the cars, their parent company was SAAB AB the aerospace and defence company that is still going these days.
SAAB Automobile was sold to GM back in 1989, and the SAAB 9000 series was produced under GM leadership
Huh neat. Also its always fucking GM.
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.
Hey, my '97 is also a Type SH. I’m the eighth owner according to the Carfax. Somehow, the interior is complete (sans radio), it has the original wheels, and was never resprayed. Except for the trunk lid when some dingbat removed the spoiler. The VIN sticker was painted over. But you can make out the numbers. All VINs match. Somehow, this car has driven 257,000 miles, and is still 99.9% complete.
I’d love to drive an AP1 at least once, but I had a Prelude when I was a teenager so getting to own another (especially with a stick) is deeply meaningful to me. I was having my midlife crisis at 31, I guess lol
I so very much preferred speedometers like that which had every 10 marked rather than every 20 like so many seem to do
🥵
Oh wow, what car is that!?
C4 Corvette!
So does this one.
So does this one.
Used to love Super Pursuit Mode.
Even made the cars on the overpass go faster.
Gen Z: Can’t read analog clocks. “What speed am I going? There are no numbers!”
I love a digital speedometer but dials as back up feel important
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.
Yeah, sparks a whole lot of emotions, but joy is not among them.
Basically nobody actually needs a tach taking up as much space as the speedometer.
No, I’m building a replacement unified speedo/tach for my motorcycle, the tach is huge and analog, speed is digital in the middle.
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 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.
I’ve dailyed six manual cars and two of them didn’t have a tach (both Fords?), and one of those was too old to even have a shift light. Honestly, even when I was new I barely looked at the tach when I had one anyway, and I didn’t really start to look at until I learned how to really get good at rev-matching for heal-toe and dropping gears. I just shift by ear and ass like 90% of the time.
I use it because on my bike I need to set the correct minimum RPM after cleaning my carbs. Also sometimes I want to go faster than I should in 6th, a quick glance at the tach tells me how much headroom before redline I’ve got.
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.
Nah man, if you see your tach wobble, you know you’ve got a carb jet issue, or dirty injectors.
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?
It does spark more though
Does it spark as much as a Star Trek high-tech panel?
If not, it’s not futuristic enough.
In my opinion, the worst part about new cars is that they are essentially tracking devices and some of them can be remotely controlled.
Any suggestions on how to get a car that doesn’t track you and was built post-2010?
There is a website that you can opt out of having certain data tracked.
But I imagine insurance companies will use it as an excuse to raise your rates if you opt out
There is also the issue of companies pinky-promising that they won’t track you but still call home.
But if no other alternatives are available, this is good to know.
Mazda MX5. I have a 2019 and it’s simple. Heated seats, blindspot mirrors, backup camera, led headlights. Absolute joy to drive.
No other tech that tracks you as far as I’m aware.
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.
Yep real knobs and buttons make more sense, but i guess touchscreens are cheaper these days.
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.
Dangle a tin can on a string out the window and listen to the rate of the jingle jangle on the pavement?
There often is a button or too within the dash cluster to change things like the trip meter or cluster brightness
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.
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.
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
Good luck getting an auto manufacturer to allow you to customise your dash lol
Yeah, it’s mostly aftermarket ones, which is harder to do on modern cars ( I think? I haven’t actually seen anyone try to use aftermarket dash software on a built-in dash screen)
I can’t imagine trying to flash software to my car; it would almost certainly be illegal in my jurisdiction (I can’t even retrofit LED lights on my Ford 🥲)
If they added the options to choose what to see it would be fantastic! Most don’t though.
Yeah, the potential of digital dashes is amazing, but the practical application of them , especially from OEMs, is pretty mid.
Some aftermarket ones are pretty customizable though.
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.
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.
That’s not actually true, studies show that analog dials (or digital imitations) are better than regular numbers or bars as speed displays.
The thing about analog dials is that they offer a lower mental load than a simple number. Seeing the dial move is a better indication of speed change than a number changing, and the “wasted” space in the dial offers a comparative idea of how fast you’re going.
The human brain is just much better at perceiving relative changes than absolute ones. Seeing a 20 rise to 80 doesn’t convey as much info as seeing a dial in the bottom rise to the middle.
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.
The reason this information isn’t readily available is probably because putting more information only serves to increase the mental load on the driver which might cause distractions, and consequently, more accidents.
Yeah i have a background in human factors engineering and something like that is just asking for unsafe driving. If it can wait until you aren’t driving then all you should see of it is a little notification telling you fo check it when needed.
Hard disagree. It is SO much faster for me to read a digital number readout than a analogue one.
This isn’t touch screen controls (which are terrible). It’s a readout.
Yeah I thought since I’m old I’d be like gimme the old way, but I would actually prefer simplicity for regular commutes.
But I feel like not even car companies want me to have simplicity so they can monetize more doodads
I will never put a light mode display in my car. I will take an analogue dial over something that burns spots into my retinas when I’m trying to drive. Even with dark mode, the amount of ambient light coming off that thing is gonna bother me at night.
We need to downgrade everybody’s headlights while we’re talking about personal preference too. If the car behind me has lights that are so bright they cast a shadow over my own headlights, they’re too bright.
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.
And on top of that, at any moment, they (Tesla) can remove pretty much any feature they feel like in a push update, which they have done… Personally, I think removing existing features from already sold products should be illegal, flat out
