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Tesla Inspire Multiple Displays in Automobiles
March 04, 2019
 
Inspired by Tesla, there seems to be a schism between car owners who really like the richness of screen displays and those who don't trust the hardware to always work, feeling it is unnecessarily distracting or simply hate digging through the menus that invariably accompany screens. If you are in the latter group, gird yourself for the future: Cars will increasingly go screen for a handful of reasons

  • Maps: Map-based turn-by-turn navigation has revolutionized driving, both in terms of how to get somewhere and how to discover places worth a visit. Whether Android Auto, Apple CarPlay or the car's built-in nav, a generous screen is needed to make the experience work. Until fully autonomous cars are ubiquitous, interacting with a nav screen is an appetite that isn't going to fade.
  • Cameras: Rear cameras are requiredon new cars, and next in line for ubiquity will be front and side cameras, followed by night-vision cameras. All of those need a big center screen (or maybe a smaller side screen) to display on. 
  • Media: Podcasts, streams and second-row video all demand a screen to either display content or, at a minimum, meta information and album art. Few of us would be content to see our media information laid out on a scrolling line of dot matrix text. 

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Figure 1: Audi Virtual Cockpit
Source:  Company
Audi's Virtual Cockpit was the first example of how a fully flexible screen interface could inhabit a traditional gauge location and do so at a reasonable price: It debuted in the 2016 Audi TT, not the flagship A8.

  • Flexibility: Devoting 10 or 12 square inches to a speedometer, or worse, to a tachometer that only does one thing, is rapidly becoming a crude waste of space. When that same amount of real estate is devoted to a screen it can be used for a wide variety of displays that change with driving context. Audi's Virtual Cockpitis the best, but far from the last, example of this we'll see.
 
  • Updates: Over-the-air updates can't change a dash composed of gauge faces and knobs the way it can a screen-based instrument panel. Such updates open the door to increased owner satisfaction while they own a car, a holy grail to carmakers who are obsessed with purchase loyalty. As long as they don't push out a bum updatethat sends your owners to the door. 
 
Figure 2: Tesla Display
Source: Company
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  • Cost: Until recently, in-car screens were a pricey upgrade from knobs and dials, but as you see them invading popularly priced cars know that the economics of LCD have changed. The Tesla Model 3 is radicalin its uses of a single center tablet, but I suspect that extreme design choice actually saves Tesla money and helps creates massive buzz around the car. However, don't expect the Model 3's extreme screen-centrism to take over auto design any time soon. A mix of dominant screens along with tactile switchgear for commonly used functions seems to be a happier medium.