My friend Ray and I picked up a new helicopter at the Robinson factory in Los Angeles on Friday. We flew along Interstate 10 to New Orleans and then hooked a left up through Atlanta towards Washington, D.C. At all of the airports prior to D.C. we would borrow a car at the FBO and return it the next morning. At the Montgomery County Airpark in Gaithersburg, Maryland, we got our first rental of the trip. Enterprise was supposed to deliver a sedan, but instead showed up with a massive black GMC Yukon pavement-melting SUV. The monster truck had only about 3000 miles on the odometer and a plethora of switches and knobs, so I think that we can assume this represents General Motors’s finest engineering achievement.
The first thing that I noticed was the lack of GPS. What kind of car company crams together $40,000 of metal, leather, and plastic and leaves out a $5 GPS chip and $25 LCD screen that would save the owner from driving around at 8 mpg searching for an address?
The second thing I noticed was the waste of “screen real estate”. Right in front of the driver were an array of almost completely useless gauges:
- voltage (always at 14)
- coolant temperature
- oil pressure
- tachometer (with a V8 and automatic who cares?)
- speedometer (in Washington, D.C. traffic you’d be lucky to achieve 15 mph)
Why would any of this information be given such a valuable position in front of the driver’s eyes? As soon as LCD screens became daylight-readable and cheap, you’d have expected car companies to put the moving map in front of the driver. If the oil pressure plummeted, the speed was more than 15 percent over the limit for the currently traveled road (GPS databases seem to include speed limits for each road), or something else abnormal happened, you would expect some of the display to switch over to showing the now-critical information.
Instead of asking the taxpayers for $50 billion, G.M. could have used the moving map in front of the driver to earn significant revenue. The moving map could show nearly hotels, restaurants, and shops. G.M. could be collecting a commission any time that a driver chose to stop at an establishment that had been featured in the moving map.
What was Ray’s comment on these ideas? “I have a 1969 Jaguar in my garage. The gauges on this SUV present exactly the same information in exactly the same way.”
How about the rest of the car? The rear hatch kept popping slightly open while driving, generating some road noise and a warning message… underneath the tachometer in 1970s-style LED letters.
Hi Philip:
While I agree with your overall point, I take issue with calling oil pressure, voltage, and coolant temperature gauges useless. Certainly they don’t need to be front-and-center, but they SHOULD be somewhere.
The voltage gauge lets you see that your alternator is failing BEFORE you wind up on the side of I-10 in the middle of absolutely nowhere. And that tachometer is very important if you’re towing a heavy load through hilly terrain — especially if your SUV isn’t equipped with a transmission cooler. Likewise, the oil pressure gauge lets you see that something’s going wrong BEFORE the engine seizes. Just because the average car owner is too dumb to use these tools correctly does not mean that the mechanically-inclined among us are in the same boat.
Do you rely on warning lights when you’re flying? I would bet that you, like all pilots, scan the instruments to make sure everything is running correctly. Those instruments are hardly useless.
Sure, put them over on the side somewhere or incorporate them into an LCD display, but don’t take them away and don’t call them useless!
I’ve never driven a manual transmission, but I nevertheless find a tachometer to be important. It can, occasionally, be a useful diagnostic tool. Also, once my speedometer stopped working for a while and I was able to tell (within a certain margin of error) how fast I was going because I knew what engine speeds corresponded with what speeds. My first car (a 1984 Camry) had a tach, and now I feel naked driving without one.
But I generally agree that in many cars, the location and presentation of many dashboard items is questionable.
First, in full disclosure, I own a Yukon (in fact I am on my second one after owning the first for ten years). I have been reading your blog for some time, and generally enjoy the well thoughout arguements and discourse.
I must, however, take exception to some of the facts and implied bias of this blog entry.
First, a NAV system (including GPS-based mapping) is an option on most GMC vehicles (which is competitive with most new cars in today’s market), one that I guess Enterprise did not elect to provide in their rental vehicle. The LED-based driver information system (that alerted you that your luggage was in danger of falling out the open back hatch onto the highway) is the standard option.
Second, while SUVs are certainly not ‘economy’ cars, your 8 mpg comment is, in my experience, not correct by at least a factor of two (sometimes close to three). As an owner with a large family to haul around, I really appreciate the economy of scale ability to move everyone (and all their stuff) in one vehicle.
Third, regarding your comment about engine instrumentation, (i) every vehicle I have ever owned, regardless of make or model has had some minimal engine performance instrumentation, and (ii) SUVs are commonly used as tow/haul vehicles and having more versus less engine instrumentation comes in handy in that application. Also, as an engineer and pilot, I assume that you understand the basics of the ergonomics of instrumentation and the reasons why analog dial-type gauges continue to be the display of choice for auto applications.
I hope to see the ‘smart’ display applications you discuss that dynamically allocate ‘screen real estate’ based on contextual ties between NAV database information and the road, or vehicle status in the next Yukon I buy, in about 8 years…
Cheers.
I rented a Chevy Malibu earlier this month, what a disappointment. There was absolutely no passion in the car. Toyotas don’t strike me as passionate cars, but at least you know they will last.
On the other hand, my father had an early model Pontiac Solstice. That car was built and designed with passion and it showed. Truly fun to drive, a head turner. That car actually gave me hope for GM.
Paddy: We borrowed a Chevy Malibu from the kind folks at Flightline First at the New Orleans Lakefront airport. Ray and I both liked the car. The fact that it lacked a navigation system didn’t bother me as much because the goal with the Malibu was apparently to keep the price as low as possible.
Chris: I know that a navigation system is an option on most vehicles sold today, but pricing navigation at $2000 per car, seeing who is dumb enough to pay that, and sticking the nav screen out of the driver’s primary view doesn’t seem like a great long-term strategy. Navigation should be designed into the car, placed where most easily used, and built into the price. As for having the engine instruments taking up all of the screen real estate… in aviation you have the option by pressing a button to see a detailed page of engine data, but it isn’t hogging panel space normally.
My first car was a 1953 Chevy. My last GM was a 1983 Chevy Celebrity.
Both cars–30 years apart–had two exactly the same very annoying “features.”
1 – you could lock the keys in the car very easily
2 – you could leave the lights on & exit the car (to return to a dead battery).
Thirty years apart & they couldn’t figure how to improve those “features.”
Phil,
I shudder to think what traffic would be like if all cars had a moving map in front directly of the driver that displayed places to stay, eat, etc.
The idea bhind safe driving is for the driver to keep his eyes out of the vehicle, not inside of it.
So along those lines – we have moving maps in our airplanes, and we can actually
program our nav while in flight: divert to …. I get in my new Toyota Prius,
and am greeted with “Nav grey” when I try to program the gps/nav
while in motion. In the later model years, there are no known hacks to
work around this. Strange bit of legal fascism there, apparently a
common complaint. Makes one thankful that even in the otherwise
litigious aviation sector they still allow us to twiddle the knobs and dials
freely rather than having to land first 🙂 But to your point about
the steam gages still found in cars, one wonders to what extent lawyer
driven UI design rules the day in Detroit – if the auto manufacturer makes
the display too distracting, perhaps is the first to market an unconventional
or unfamiliar design, then an accident later, or heaven forbid, a pattern
of accidents, they bear actionable responsibility. Of course in
the current economic climate those pockets aren’t nearly so deep, but when
we eventually, as taxpayers, end up owning all the Detroit car makers, those
deep pockets are then the deepest of all: our own, via Uncle Sam 😀
The 1988 Corvette had an optional electronic dashboard with a bank of florescent readouts. The user could program what these readouts displayed (as indicated by an LED).
If a non-displayed critical parameter such as oil pressure went out of tolerance then the car would override the user selection and display the out of tolerance value. I think (I’m not certain) that there was a ‘master caution’ light also.
The reviewers hated this system because they didn’t trust the computer. It was really a pretty neat system, very aircraft like.
I think you’re way underpricing the cost of a gps. If you really think you can make a usable, updatable gps, with a database, that can survive in a car, for $25 then you ought to go put Garmin out of business.
I’d hate having a moving map display right in front of me where the speedometer, tachometer and engine instruments should be. YMMV. Even on an automatic the tach is nice if you are driving on slippery roads, and it’s nice if you ever drive on the autobahn.
I think you ought to also give GM credit for OnStar, which is a really clever and useful safety feature.
I do agree with other posters who commented on the ‘souless’ quality of many GM vehicles. Gm has done a lot of clever engineering over time, I think they have a problem with execution and too much committee think.
]]] What was Ray’s comment on these ideas? “I have a 1969 Jaguar in my garage. The gauges on this SUV present exactly the same information in exactly the same way.” [[[
In the late-80s/early-90s GM tried a variety of “modern” instrumentation techniques, including heads-up displays, cars that would speak to you (leading to still repeated jokes about your car saying “door is ajar”), among others.
People didn’t like them.
Which is why it’s back to that classic information in that classic way, again and again.