The High-Tech Dash

The monumental question being asked these days of automotive engineers is why they bothered to design dashboards that speak but neglected to teach them to say anything more interesting than “Fasten your seat belt.” How about a little small talk for lonely cruises down Preston Road? But no, all we get is “Your oil pressure is low.” Traditionalists will be pleased to learn that voice synthesis seems to be an idea whose time has come and already gone-a victim of a so-what quotient that exceeds the gee-whiz factor. But don’t sit around and wait for a return to the good old days when dashboards featured only a speedometer odometer, fuel gauge, and a couple of warning lights. They don’t even make “dashboards” anymore. They’re called instrument panels these days, and they include a bewildering array of digital readouts, graphs, and switches.

High-tech electronic wizardry has brought the information age to car interiors- with a vengeance. Take the Chevrolet Corvette. The instrument panel is teeming with reds, yellows, blues, and greens against an eye-catching background of circles marked with cross hairs. Appearances suggest that you’re not supposed to carry a passenger in the new ’Vette. You’re supposed to ride with a copilot. You can imagine highway conversation along the lines of “Roger, Red Dog One, missiles now locked on target Honda.”

The 1987 Buick Riviera, touted by General Motors engineers as the most sophisticated domestic production car, features a three-by-four-inch cathode ray tube with dozens of displays, including “climate functions.” Your first inclination upon entering a Subaru XT Coupe Turbo is to search for the slot for the quarter. The instrument panel has all the trappings of a video game, including a moving image of the car.

Engineers speak convincingly about the day when cars will be equipped with sophisticated computers that can produce electronic maps on video monitors. Unfortunately, in most cases, the current generation of electronic instruments just presents the same old information in a new way. The Ford Aeroslar, for instance, has a feature called the Warning Center. Despite the portentous title and novelty of an image of the van as seen from above, all it consists of is a few mundane warning and indicator lights.

Electronic instruments are still an option, but not for long. Because electronic instruments are smaller and less expensive than mechanical gauges, it’s only a matter of time before instrument panels go the way of the watch industry-digital dominance at the low end of the market. Who knows? Maybe by then they’ll have taught dashboards the art of conversation.