Guys it’s been 8 months. It was a bad take.
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.
Touch screen in cars isn’t a good idea, though. They may distract the driver.
Yup! If I’m driving and want to change station or volume I need to be able to know what I’m doing without watching, and it already feels distracting and dangerous enough to me. With a touch screen I can’t feel the buttons or knobs and I must look at the screen to do anything.
I never had a car with a touchscreen (my current car doesn’t even have an AUX or USB port) so I don’t know if it’s already like this, but probably an hybrid between the two would be ideal. You get a touchscreen to thinker with it and create presets or whatever when you’re not moving, and buttons to change song/station/preset/volume/whatever when driving
My old Scion had a digital one. I think it’s an aesthetic preference.
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.
Digital speedometer? Gross.
Wouldn’t it be constantly fluctuating between speeds one or two numbers apart? Unless your foot is magic or you’re in cruise control, lol. I feel like it could be distracting.
Digital speedos average the speed over the last (eg) second and when it changes will usually do some form of animation between digits. This way you don’t get constantly fluctuating numbers.
As for analogue versus digital. It depends how you think of a speedo. If you think of it as a percentage of maximum then analogue is best (like a fuel gauge) but if you think of it as needing to know your ‘exact’ speed (like temperature) then digital is best.
You could make like a circular shape on the screen with numbers correlating to the speed on different angles. Then maybe add some rectangle which points at the current speed and effectively changes the angle when the speed changes.
Oh wait…
Car manufacturers won’t spend extra on a fancy feature unless they can’t sell without it. That’s why most cars have such nasty low-res screens for the entertainment system, when a nice high res one (like the one you have in your phone) would only cost a few quid more.
It look cool
This must be related to people in their 20’s not knowing how to read a traditional clock anymore.
Yeah, probably not. It’s just that digital is better, analog is just what folks are used to and that for some people means it’s automatically better. I grew up with analog, my first cars had analog and if I’ve never seen it again, I wouldn’t miss it.
I have a Yaris with both.
I had a VW Tiguan that had both, but the digital one didn’t poll very often so it was incredibly unreliable. My Audi Q7 has both too, but the analog one is on a digital display, which is kind of weird to think about. Like a computer using an analog clock.
I suspect speedometers are never completely accurate. So instead of an exact number, they’ll use a needle and you can guess how fast you’re approximately going
This. They are actually not accurate because of regulations.
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I think in this case analogue is actually easier to read. You don’t need to actually read any of the numbers to know how fast you’re driving, you just look at the angle of the needle.
The human brain is great at things like this, and less good at reading numbers, which is much more learnt.
I have both and prefer the digital one. I find it much easier to drive a precise speed with it.
I prefer analog ones. I’m too OCD with digital ones trying to keep it at an even number
What I wonder is why more cars don’t have HUDs that are projected onto the windshield. That tech has been around and in cars for over 25 years. You don’t have to take your eyes off the road at all.
