This week, the screen I will mostly be looking at is the one pictured below, after a hire car lottery ran out of Kia Picantos and provided me with a Volvo XC60. I’m not unhappy about this.
The XC60 is a comfortable car and this is mostly a comfortable screen to look at. It’s easy to be critical and plenty (including me) have been of the direction Volvo has taken with its interior functionality lately, with mass migration of controls to a touchscreen – including essentials like the foglight switches – at the expense of separate-button usability.
Speculation, of course, but this may be one of the reasons the pragmatic Håkan Samuelsson was restored as interim CEO. He’s a steady hand who understands that cars are not smartphones.
The XC60 has been around since 2017, and while its digital instrument cluster has been updated in that time, there’s still a lot to like about the simplicity of its graphics and fonts. It doesn’t overburden a driver with information;
I could turn off the map if I wanted. And I should also find myself pleased about the fact that it retains two dials, one for the speedo and one for the rev counter, because the genius of a dial is just how much it tells you in such short order.
At a glance, you can see a facet’s upper and lower limits, with a needle that shows how far along that range you are, the direction of travel and the rate of change. Numbers alone can’t do this: they can only tell you where you are right now.
There’s a reason that when film directors want to show an aeroplane in distress, they show a needle spinning anticlockwise very rapidly. We all know what it means.
That should make this Volvo’s dials preferable to use than the numerical script for the speed. Should but, I’m finding, doesn’t.
With dials nestling perhaps too discreetly around the edge of the screen and with a bold numerical font front and centre showing the speed right next to a graphic that apes roadside speed limit signs (usually but far from always, of course, getting the limit correct), I find myself looking at the numbers more frequently instead.
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I don't like Volvo's digital offerings. If it's highly configurable like the screens in VW group cars ( apart from SEAT ) then digital is very good - I can display whatever information I want in whatever format I want. If it's not, such as the display in our Toyota, quite frankly it's a **** mess.
I also include BMW in the mess category which is crazy given that their analogue dials were once by far the best in the business. and often copied.
By the same notion the simple and clear physical dials in my na eunos are also easy to read and pleasant to look at, so I have no real favourite, both are great in my opinion. I do like retro digital instruments in MK2 astra GTE's and C4 corvettes for example, as they look of their time and to me seem cool.