this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
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Not true. When I glance down I am not looking for a numerical value, "57.8". I'm looking for the pointer around "60", ... yeah that's what it feels like, all's well.
We're not machines processing data. Cars are prosthetic devices, extensions of our bodies. You feel them down the road. You hit a big pothole and think, "ouch".
Digital odometer is necessary. Everything else is a visual ratio. Racers (used to) arrange their gauges so that every pointer is more or less straight up and down when "normal". You don't want to puzzle out meanings, you want a visual indication of what you're feeling in the car.
Digits give us precision, which is absolutely the last thing you need while driving. At best you need go/nogo, or trend. ("fuel lower than it was").
With instruments, the following are all completely independent: precision, resolution, accuracy. Even a digital speedo, how many digits you need? 2? 3? 6? lol 27.234 doesn't mean shit. "28" is better. "hair less than 30" is fine. And "27.234" is just dumb when the speedo has a 2% error rate, which is quite good, as tires size varies with load, air pressure, brand, wear.
What's REALLY nice is a separate display with DIGITS on an LCD and a DATA LOGGER! Then you get both! It's the best! I do this to my project cars; antiquated weird fun dials that are great for DRIVING, and a datalogger that writes to a microSD that 99% of the time you don't care about, but if it's running funny, or something fails, you can see it in the logs. It's GREAT!
Here's a couple shitty pics of my daily driver:
You just wanted to show off your sick classic ride. And I for one need to see the outside now.
Lol not completely true or untrue. Nahh would be thread hijacking.
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.