The large, wide rectangular speedometer occupies the entire gauge cluster just like the American cars used to be in the 60s to early 80s.
These things are dead. I blame John Davis and his obsession with full instrumentation. Suddenly every car has a tachometer a few gauges for oil pressure, temperature, etc. This is great for entry-level clutches. But now the stick is dead, and it makes no sense. My wife’s CR-V has a paddle that takes up the entire left side of the instrument cluster and CVT. Why!? It no longer provides useful information. Give me back my giant speedo!
Those clusters are now auxiliary gauge displays like oil pressure etc that can appear on demand or pop up if something is out of the normal range. But giving space to the tachometer by default is silly these days.
It’s not just the rectangles that we’re missing today. Looking through history, gauge design has been much more experimental and ornate than it was in the 1990s. The Plymouth Fury above is an example. You would think that automakers would leverage digital displays to compensate for that, as modern displays can form endlessly with no moving parts. Instead, we get ugly, rectangular slabs of stone tucked behind the panel’s plastic like an afterthought. This is not the future we promised.
Recommended by: Marion Cobretti
