Cognitive load. Good operator experience, user interface, you want the operator of the vehicle to require the least amount of thinking to know about the vehicle. It’s critical data they’ll need an emergency is, and in emergencies, people’s cognitive abilities go down quite a bit.

Just think about how you turn the radio down to find an address on the street, multiply that times a thousand. That’s how people think in an emergency

My car has both digital and analog on the dash.

The position of the needle on the dial is easier to see with peripheral vision, versus numbers.

Some cars have a digital speedo HUD displayed on the windshield. I find it too distracting.

Not true. When I glance down I am not looking for a numerical value, “57.8”. I’m looking for the pointer around “60”, … yeah that’s what it feels like, all’s well.

We’re not machines processing data. Cars are prosthetic devices, extensions of our bodies. You feel them down the road. You hit a big pothole and think, “ouch”.

Digital odometer is necessary. Everything else is a visual ratio. Racers (used to) arrange their gauges so that every pointer is more or less straight up and down when “normal”. You don’t want to puzzle out meanings, you want a visual indication of what you’re feeling in the car.

Digits give us precision, which is absolutely the last thing you need while driving. At best you need go/nogo, or trend. (“fuel lower than it was”).

With instruments, the following are all completely independent: precision, resolution, accuracy. Even a digital speedo, how many digits you need? 2? 3? 6? lol 27.234 doesn’t mean shit. “28” is better. “hair less than 30” is fine. And “27.234” is just dumb when the speedo has a 2% error rate, which is quite good, as tires size varies with load, air pressure, brand, wear.

What’s REALLY nice is a separate display with DIGITS on an LCD and a DATA LOGGER! Then you get both! It’s the best! I do this to my project cars; antiquated weird fun dials that are great for DRIVING, and a datalogger that writes to a microSD that 99% of the time you don’t care about, but if it’s running funny, or something fails, you can see it in the logs. It’s GREAT!

My 2019 Jetta has a 100% digital instrument cluster. It’s currently broken…just a black screen. It’s neat how reliable analogue instruments are.

I like analog gauges. I very much like knobs. I dislike anything digital in a car other than a touch screen. Cars need to be able to be operated at a glance and by feel.