FUTURE PROOF

Paul Horrell on why car designers should dial back the digital a bit

Two eyes and a nose. Our very humanity means we find that graphic attractive. Perhaps that’s why I want to see it on dashboards. Can’t be doing with all these active digital TFT instrument displays, thanks.

Apart from the comforting aesthetics of round dials, the fact is they’re more readable in most situations. Most of the world’s TFT displays do indeed allow you to switch back to a simulation of two dials. Funny that. For the sake of road-test research, I always try all the alternative configurations… then without exception settle back to those circles. Pity they’re still not as attractive as the hardware dials they’re faking. Must be a life lesson in there somewhere. If you want to continue the facial analogy, I’ll have the fuel and temp gauges at the periphery, please, like a pair of ears.

A digital readout isn’t as good as a dial at showing rate of change – acceleration and braking. But OK, at steady speeds, a digital display is more precise, and that’s handy as you tiptoe between average speed cameras. So I concede it’s nice to have a secondary digital display embedded somewhere in the face of the analogue dial, even if looks a bit cluttered.

By the way, I do want round, please. The same shape as a human pupil. BMW’s current rev-counter is idiotic: it goes anticlockwise, and through an irregular polygonal arc. Ugly. Also unreadable, especially in Sport mode – the very time when you want to see the revs – when it consists of a truncated red ‘needle’ moving on a red background. What were they thinking of?

Ah, but, the case for the defence goes, with a screen display you can switch to a map view. Theoretically useful... in practice a lash-up. These maps tend to be heading-up, not north-up. They inhabit displays that are wider than they are tall. Result is you get extensive and panoramic view of the roads either side of you, which you don’t need, but a truncated view of the very thing you want to see, the roads you’re driving towards. Duh.

So you end up dismissing the map over to the big screen in the middle of the car. Jolly good. Until the music rolls onto a different track, mastered by someone who thinks I want an insanely tizzy mix. Time to change the sounds. I jab my way through home -> media –> settings –> sound -> treble. That’s such a distracting process, I’ll switch on lane-keeping first.

Remember stereos with two eyes and a nose? Volume one end, with a co-axial treble knob around it. Tuning the other, with co-axial bass. How blissfully straightforward was that?

Turning a physical knob is always faster, more accurate, more repeatable and less distracting than engaging with a pair of up-down buttons, and those are in turn better than fiddling with a simulacrum on a touchscreen.

Dash designers are being blinded by pointless technology. We all need our eyes back.

“PITY TFT DIALS AREN’T AS ATTRACTIVE AS THE HARDWARE THEY’RE FAKING”