We Now Live In An Era Where You Can Look At So Many Speedometers At Once

The switch from analog to digital instrument clusters is now at a point where the default new car can be expected to have a full-color LCD display acting as its instrument cluster. There’s lots of potential advantages to the flexibility offered by a full-color, high-resolution raster display when it comes to displaying information needed for driving, but so far, I think most manufacturers have barely scratched the surface. One thing that these displays have allowed is something that has never really been possible in cars before, at least not without a significant amount of modification and money spent. That something is the ability to have four simultaneous speedometers visible at once.

Yes, the dream of the quad-speed display has finally been realized, and I myself have managed to experience it recently on two wildly different vehicles. We’re in a golden age, people, and I sure as hell hope you appreciate it. The two vehicles I tried this on are a 2024 Polaris Ranger XD and a 2025 Volkswagen Atlas.

Here’s the Atlas first, because it’s got a full LCD instrument cluster like you’d see in most new cars today:

So, by using a few buttons on the steering wheel, you can quite easily customize the instrument cluster to display four speedometers, three numerical and one skeuomorphic-type analog gauge with a needle. Look at that! You really can’t be more certain of your speed than when you’re confronted with four instances of it, staring you right in the face!

The Polaris is a more interesting setup, because it doesn’t use a full LCD screen for the instrument cluster; instead, it uses a pair of actual analog physical gauges (tachometer and speedometer) along with three rows of backlit seven-segment numeric displays augmented with a few 16-segment alphanumeric display characters. The middle row can be customized, so with a little work you can get three speedometers showing in the instrument cluster, and then a fourth one on the center stack infotainment screen, which is a full color LCD screen:

So, the effect is the same: four speedometers, all at once. So far, four seems to be the limit of concurrent speedometers one can get on most vehicles without additional equipment. If you have a heads up display (HUD), perhaps you could have a much-needed fifth speedo? I really felt myself needing a fifth one, so I hope that’s the case. Maybe legally all new cars should be required to display at least five speedometers for, you know, safety?

I’m being silly, of course, because all of this is silly. LCD instrument clusters offer so much possibility, and yet so little has really been done to actually re-think what an instrument cluster should be, with most automakers just adding fancy futuro-seeming blue grids behind floating numbers that cast slight reflections instead of really coming up with some new attempts to convey information as effectively as possible.

At least there’s been movement away from rampant skeuomorphism, when everyone was just rendering realistic-looking analog gauges on LCD screens, a charming if faintly ridiculous thing to do.

Interestingly, the limitations of the earliest digital instrument clusters, which were mostly seven-segment numbers and shaped elements that could be illuminated, caused more creativity of design, because automakers literally could not recreate analog gauges. They had to try some new ideas, and they definitely did just that:

I’m not saying these approaches were always successful, but at least they were trying something. The potential for novel instrument designs and customizations is nearly limitless, and all that most modern cars let you do is shove four speedometers into the display? That’s absurd, and these systems should be smarter than that.

A number of years ago I made some sketches of possible new approaches to instrument cluster design:

I’m not saying these are perfect either, but at least I was trying some new-ish ideas. Why aren’t carmakers even doing basic things, like displaying the full description of OBD codes when a check engine light is on, or letting owners have real customization tools, like letting them drag and drop and resize instruments of their own choosing in whatever arrangement they like?

The drag-and-dropping could be done on the center stack screen, which is almost always a touch screen, and then the chosen arrangement can be sent to the instrument cluster. Why hasn’t this happened already? It feels so obvious!

Being able to customize an instrument cluster to display four speedometers is funny, but it’s also a good reminder that carmakers are not exactly putting that much effort into the information design and UX of crucial components like these. There’s shockingly little innovation happening here, and I for one would love to see more experimentation.

Besides, it’s software! Companies could hedge their bets by including some traditional layouts and designs along with bolder ones with new ideas. There’s nothing to lose here!

Until then, we’ll just have to make do with four speedometers when it comes to innovation.

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