...

[email protected]

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

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

Gen Z: Can't read analog clocks. "What speed am I going? There are no numbers!"

[email protected]

Wow, I didn't even notice the displayed values

[email protected]

she is a very small and cute little sandwich

[email protected]

Lmao, high beams, no seatbelt at 108kph for a 30kph speed limit. Ooof.

[email protected]

Don't they sell add-on projector Huds which snake a wire down to OBD-ii port?

[email protected]

Don't they sell add-on projector Huds which snake a wire down to OBD-ii port?

[email protected]

No, I'm building a replacement unified speedo/tach for my motorcycle, the tach is huge and analog, speed is digital in the middle.

[email protected]

Nah man, if you see your tach wobble, you know you've got a carb jet issue, or dirty injectors.

[email protected]

Of course it doesn't spark, is electric

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

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.

[email protected]

It’s a screenshot from MKBHD’s latest video.

[email protected]

Is it detecting a car in front as well?

[email protected]

An advantage of a proper dial is that you can instinctively see the change in speed by how quickly the needle moves.

[email protected]

So does this one.

snooggums

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.

snooggums

If they added the options to choose what to see it would be fantastic! Most don't though.

ChouxFleur

Renault have been doing this for ages. I had a 2009 Mégane which gave the speed as a digital number. Fuel and oil temps were bars to either side. Revs was a physical dial.

It was such a great car, just a shame about the engineering...