Ten years or so ago, only a few high-end cars had LCD touchscreens. All of a sudden, every new car has one. Big ones are becoming very common. Really big ones now separate the luxury cars from the run-of-the-mill cars.
But for how much longer?
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Eric – you dont get it do you. Once the screen covers the whole windshield – imagine how much safer cars will be without the glass window upfront which can shatter and injure you!!
Eventually these will replace windscreens because it is easier to display augmented reality on a screen than project it on a windscreen. Add AI (not general AI) and you take the people out of the equation. And if you want a horror movie, some general AI will use this to take over. Or the CCP/SVD will hack it all and drive you off a bridge or into a rock
It’s amazing. I read articles all the time about how these screens are bad for our eyes and can cause vision loss, and yet they are putting more of these damn screens in our cars. Where’s the logic in that?
On that Lincoln if you actually have to reach up and touch that screen the dash top will be a scratched mess in days – rings, watches, bracelets vs plastic cowhide.
It will keep getting bigger until it looks like the Enterprise’s bridge with a steering wheel unless people reject it en-masse
I think so, too –
I also think we may be on the cusp of a divergence – as AI and human augmentation gets rolling. The augmented humans will “embrace” this digitized future; us savages will reject it.
This savage will never own a car with a touch screen. Never!
Nor I, Philo!
When I drive my old truck – after driving the new vehicles – I am struck by how superior my old truck is in almost every way. It does not pester me. It does not try to correct my driving. I can adjust the controls easily, using knobs and switches. Everything just works. New vehicles are basically enormous sailfawns and just as irritating, if all you’re wanting to do is just go for a drive.
Id rather see it all be a heads up display if you can make things go away. Nothing to get fingerprints on. Although real gauges would be best.
Hi RS,
Well, the auto manufacturers will state they need your fingerprints because how else will they determine if it is you driving the car. I am curious if upon the purchase of these vehicles if someone isn’t signing away their biometric data or verifying collection of it to be used at a later date.
The autonomous vehicle tech like lidar, radar and situational awareness broadcasting will be put into “next generation” semi-autonomous vehicles, like Tesla’s cameras but more stuff. At some point they’ll make the case that a sheet of thick laminated safety glass is unsafe and too heavy, so they’ll shrink the size down and bring up the dashboard to eye level. Like an airplane cockpit, the instrument cluster will take over the primary field of view. Then they’ll take all the sensor data and build virtual displays. But instead of having all the gauges needed to keep track of a multiengine jet, they’ll just be full of warnings and alerts. Cars in the other lane will flash bright yellow. Lane markers will be luminescent. Getting too close to the car in front will put up full screen warnings and big red silhouettes of cars. And maybe even create the illusion of being closer than you really are. And the navigation system will feature prominently in the display when a turn is coming up so you can’t blame the GPS for missing your exit.
But I agree with Eric. Dashboards are fashion, not function. There will be a return, probably on the very high end, to true mechanical gauges, even if they’re still driven by PWM signals from the electronics. They might even try to recreate some of the odd behavior of the old time Smiths gauge clusters of the classic British roadsters, just because it’s just more code. Warning lights that are a dictated shape will become individual LED modules that recreate the warm tungsten light bulbs of old. And windscreens will grow big again, the weight penalty be damned!
I recently rented a car, and was given a Navigator as a free upgrade. I was stunned by the long touchscreen dashboard, and actually thought it kind of cool. But more about its squared steering wheel. Sup wit dat?
Before I hit “play” on the video I thought it was a Kia…
The skyscraper-height screen in the lede photo is even more ludicrous than the Lincoln Navigator’s in Eric’s accompanying video.
Let’s talk about saaaaafety. Two decades of cell phone training have conditioned people to compulsively glance at the screen every time its bright colors shift, or it emits a ding or a beep. This is a formula for continuously distracted driving.
Another saaaafety aspect is the ongoing compromise of forward visibility as a result of taller hood levels, with giant pickups being the most extreme case. But crossovers and SUVs are getting taller, too. Now add a foot-tall panoramic screen atop the dash — as in the preposterous lede photo — and short people won’t even be able to see below the horizon.
The result: you could run over a pedestrian and not even know it. In fact, pedestrian deaths are on a steady uptrend over the past decade. Tall hood lines and rhinoceros-faced front facades knock ’em down like ten pins. And what do fedgov regulators do in response? They laff like the baked maniac in Reefer Madness who runs over a little kid and howls in glee.
Douchescreens are our misfortune.
We will see if they listen to the pushback on the lack of real buttons or not.
It’s gonna be a hard one for them to resist doing, it’s extremely cheap for them to install (of course not cheap for us to fix). I don’t have high hopes as they haven’t listened to customers much lately.