What were they thinking?
08/02/2018
Do you remember many years ago when you were a boy (or girl) and dared to look through the side window of a parked car and admire the dashboard (and perhaps the speedometer reading 200 km/h or more)?
That's a thing of the past in modern cars. More and more vehicles are being equipped with purely electronic cockpits, which Volkswagen calls "Active Info Display" and is basically a high-resolution LCD monitor that can display a wide variety of things while driving and can be configured within certain limits. But when the car is stationary, the screen is black. You can't see anything.
In the past, the dashboard was one of the most important distinguishing features of a car. The cockpit of a Glas 1300 GT or BMW 2000 (our example here, on the left) looked very different from that of a Citroën 2 CV or Opel Kadett. And the Veglia instruments in a Ferrari differed from the Smiths clocks in a Bentley, the VDO displays in a Porsche or the Jaeger instruments in a Facel Vega.
However, modern display technology could have been used to create individual and beautifully designed instruments to differentiate the brand and type of car from the competition. Yes, it would even have been possible to display something different on a stationary car than on a moving car, but it seems that the opportunities were not seized.
And so the classic displays in the BMW 2000 from 1971 look much more attractive than the modern Active Info Display in the VW Golf GTI ... at least we think so.
