I mooted this a while ago and the 'flood' has begun.

The new Fiat 500 Cult has an all LCD display...



... as does the new Audi TT






Compared to traditional 'analogue' instruments I suspect these LCD displays are very inexpensive to manufacture.

 

Also highly flexible - you can display whatever you want without a total redesign of anything but the driving software.

 

New Volvo S60...

 

And my current (no pun intended...) favourite is the BMW i3; it's not pretending to look like analogue.

 

That TT dashboard looks a bit distracting with the sat nav on-screen.

Edit: just realised that it may not in fact be a TT after all. What's it from?

 

They're both the new TT; the second-from-top image in the first post is the Nvidia pre-production TT screen and the second image is the actual display, albeit with the enhanced navigation view.

 

I think that you are correct about the manufacturing costs.

However when the stealer diagnoses that you need a new one I bet the price will make your eyes water. Then you have to get the new one programmed in (on top of getting it physically fitted..........)

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

No - you just disconnect it and reconnect the new one - the panel isn't where the intelligence sits. This is just like replacing one computer screen for another one.

 

Wonder if this will spawn a whole new industry of dealers / after market people selling you upgrades to latest "look" or colour schemes ?

Not sure what the legal position is on customising something so critical and/or distracting.

 

Not necessarily. With phones, they're building the display control directly into the same SOC (System on a Chip) that does the CPU, GPU, RAM and everything else, so this sort of thing could be one ready assembled unit with display and system all stuck together in a box. And that means the dealer will just have one part number for the whole thing, and charge a fortune for a new one if there's any fault (like with VSA).