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Saturday, July 19, 2008

Silly Camaro Gauges

Photos of the production version of the 2010 Camaro are out, and it looks like GM has retained the silly retro muscle car gauges they had on the concept vehicle. In front of the shifter, and down low away from the driver's forward line of sight, are four analog pods showing engine torque, battery voltage, coolant temperature, and oil pressure.

Photo borrowed from Autoblog

This is a strange idea. If the information is important, it should be at eye level. Many high performance cars have important or interesting information (turbo boost) shown on pods mounted to the A-pillar. If the information isn't that important, then use the space for something that is, like a slot for your cool retro Ray-Ban sunglasses. Who really tracks battery voltage? Either you have enough to crank or you don't. And torque, who needs a torque meter when you have a tachometer and a throttle to give you the same basic information?

A better idea would have been to integrate an accelerometer display into the IP, so the driver could lay down some rubber and then see how many g's they managed to pull.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

i love the gauges, very clasic with a modern touch....this is one hott car.

Anonymous said...

Wow! Hey, way to miss the point! Have you ever seen the Gauges in a '68 Camaro? Where are they? Right where they are on the new one. Congrats.

Jim said...

I agree with Zizzy! Do you think they would actually put on there how many G's your pulling? I think it looks cool the way they should be.

halojones-fan said...

Zizzy: And they were just as useless there, too.

I'm not sure why manufacturers are so terrified of the concept of head-up displays.

Actually, no. I do understand. It's because the people who design cars are old farts, and old farts are conservative elitists. If they had their way we wouldn't have any instruments at all! Time your shifts by listening to the engine note (and of course all transmissions are manual.) And you don't need a speedometer because the only speed that matters is "faster than the other guy".

Anonymous said...

What instrumentation do you liberal youngsters need in your automatic Prius' and so-called Smart cars? Not much, I'd think.
A little light to let you know it's time to plug in maybe.
That being, maybe the dome light could illuminate as an event marker and you could call it a heads-up display.

Anonymous said...
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