Guys it’s been 8 months. It was a bad take.
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You’re absolutely right that well designed analog guages are glancable. But that only really matters if you’re racing. If the difference between glancing for 0.4 seconds and 0.5 seconds matters, then you’re driving too aggressively for a public road.
I personally prefer the digital speedo. I find a sense of comfort in the perceived accuracy. I find it easier to read than analog guages on most commuter cars, where the needle is pointed in some random direction for most speed limits, the numbers are small and dense, with lots of markers. With a digital speedo I can glance down to my big ol’ high contrast display and be like “speed starts with a 5, good enough”
I’m not looking at the speedo to get a trend, I can hear the engine or feel the acceleration in my body for that.
For other guages: Tachometer: is dying off, but really all you need is a shift light if you’re even driving a manual. Gas: the amount in your tank doesn’t matter, it’s your range that matters, and a digital display for range makes sense because it lets you plan your trip. Oil/coolant temps: hot/normal/cold lights are probably all you need. Even then you really only need to show it when it’s not normal (which is something a digit dash can do). Boost: for daily commuters (where turbos are actually pretty common now) just a light to show if boost is too high. For performance cars, this is pretty much the only time I can see an analog guage really being better, but even then there are other less common but equally effective ways to display this kind of low-precision wide-range information.
Of course, if you’re talking about style and aesthetics, then both digital and analog have their place, depending on the aesthetic you’re going for.
An analogue gauge is useful because you can see the rate of change not just the current value.
You can design a digital readout to intuitively provide the same. And I think you’re overstating the importance of rate of change in analog guages that you find in commuter cars.
Some sort of scale on the side/bottom of the screen would solve that easy enough. It’s only really useful when accelerating into the highway or from a red light, not terribly important.
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Not really, you never really check how fast the needle moves it’s a side effect of checking your speed. A scale by the numbers, or as a circle around the numbers, would have the same affect. You just noticed how fast it’s moving in your periphery as you check your speed.
More points of failure and less intuitive.
I disagree that it is inherently less intuitive, it depends on the design. You’re overthinking the points of failure part.
My car has both digital and analog on the dash.
The position of the needle on the dial is easier to see with peripheral vision, versus numbers.
Some cars have a digital speedo HUD displayed on the windshield. I find it too distracting.
Cognitive load. Good operator experience, user interface, you want the operator of the vehicle to require the least amount of thinking to know about the vehicle. It’s critical data they’ll need an emergency is, and in emergencies, people’s cognitive abilities go down quite a bit.
Just think about how you turn the radio down to find an address on the street, multiply that times a thousand. That’s how people think in an emergency
My 2019 Jetta has a 100% digital instrument cluster. It’s currently broken…just a black screen. It’s neat how reliable analogue instruments are.
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There are a whole bunch of problems with this:
- most of the sensors are digital
- the guages are getting their signals from the ECU computer, which is a digital signal
- the guages in your car are not $10000 scientific equipment, they’re not that precise.
- the design of these analog guages means that most precision would be lost just due to human vision.
There are good arguments for analog guages in cars, but precision isn’t one.
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I like analog gauges. I very much like knobs. I dislike anything digital in a car other than a touch screen. Cars need to be able to be operated at a glance and by feel.
Touch screens are a pox upon vehicles, and need to be removed.
Disagree. I like having the screen for Android auto with music, podcasts, and especially gps. I do hate digital buttons when they aren’t necessary but i like having the big main display.
I find I never actually look directly at an analogue speedometer, you kinda just know from the angle of the needle what speed you’re doing
New to driving maybe?
That’s probably why digital displays still have analog speedometer options. At a glance it’s easier to tell what’s happening with your speed, rev count, and other levels like fuel.
But much of that utility is useful for manuals and ICE-powered cars.
Unfortunately because of the digital spedometer, the analog one usually suffers.
My mid-2010s c-class has an analog spedometer which is absolutely useless as it does not have a full needle and the fonts, spacing and colors are made to blend in with the interior instead of being readable.
All this makes me use the digital one, which is very distracting and usually lagging behind, especially when quickly accelerating.
Reading very-fast-changing data is probably the only good argument I’ve seen for the superiority of analog guages in modern cars. A fast changing digital display is impossible to read. But practically speaking, when the data is changing that quickly, typically precision isn’t important.
If car companies cared (which they clearly don’t) they could make digital displays better, by having a low refresh rate when there is low acceleration (to avoid distracting the driver), increase the refresh rate under heavy acceleration to display more current data, and apply some kind of effect to the fast changing digits to convey a sense of how fast they’re changing even if they’re changing too fast to read. Think of the odometer style altitude readout on old airplanes, where even if you can’t read the number you can tell wtf is up by how fast the numbers are spinning by.
This isn’t to say that digital guages are better. They’re just different. It’s a personal preference thing.
But you’re absolutely right that the analog guage has suffered from neglectful design in recent years.
