It’s Time We Admit That Head-Up Displays Kinda Suck

For almost every in-car technology, a time eventually comes when it loses its luster. There are good reasons why cars no longer come with compact cassette players or throttle body injection, it’s because newer, better tech superseded these innovations. While we’re on this train of thought, it’s probably time we admit that head-up displays have some significant limitations, and that they’re probably at the end of their technological shelf lives.

Now, that’s not to say that something has to work well to be cool. The Aston Martin Lagonda’s digital dashboard was famously unreliable, yet it’s still a cool attention-grabber all these decades later. The Vector W8 was a turn-of-the-’90s supercar with a bench seat and an automatic transmission, and two of them broke when Car And Driver tried conducting a road test, but it’s still one of the coolest cars ever made in America.

Head-up displays are cool, having a little readout projected in front of you like you’re piloting a fighter jet is a concept that excites the little part of us that will always be eleven years old. However, in practice, they’ve never quite lived up to their promises of highly legible information with low distraction.

First, let’s talk a little bit about polarized sunglasses. In decades past, they were useful for sport, but also a conspicuous signal of status that attracted a certain stigma. Now though, seemingly every pair of sunglasses is polarized, from fancy wraparound shades to the $2 knockoff Wayfarers near the tills of your local dollar store, and that gives the HUD a significant hurdle. See, when light hits a reflective surface, at least a portion of it tends to become horizontally polarized. Polarized sunglasses filter out horizontally polarized light, and you can probably see where this is going. Since a HUD is normally just light reflected on a windshield, the content displayed dims significantly when viewed through polarized sunglasses, to the point where the information displayed can be hard to read.

But what about night, when only perhaps Corey Hart would be wearing polarized sunglasses? While it’s easy to read a head-up display in those conditions, experience has taught me that many are a little too easy to read. Given how our pupils widen in low light and constrict when it’s bright out, it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that the brightness of a head up display within your line of vision can affect how well you see in the dark, but it’s often helpful to crank down the brightness so you can see where you’re going. Of course, this can also reduce legibility of the information reflected off the windscreen, and the result is always a compromise.

In the past, when gauges were analog and a clear digital readout was nice to have, we could overlook the limitations of head-up displays, but now we’ve kind of evolved beyond them being hugely helpful. I have a new Lincoln Nautilus parked in my driveway right now, and instead of a head-up display, it features two giant screens under one pane of glass stretching from A-pillar to A-pillar, tucked up right at the base of the windshield. It’s a setup that was easy to make fun of when it launched, but now that I’ve lived with it for a few days, I must concede that it’s better than a HUD.

While I wish for more customization options, everything I need from fuel level to speed to navigation maps to what song’s currently playing is seriously close to my line of vision, and nothing washes out when viewed through sunglasses. The screens also dim appropriately at night without losing sharpness, and they have excellent black levels, so it’s not like you’re trying to see through a grey fog.

Plus, it turns out that claims of HUDs minimizing distraction may be standing on shaky ground. Back in 2004, before in-vehicle screens were anywhere near as good as they are now, a group of researchers in Taiwan studied the efficacy of a HUD versus an LCD screen in the middle of the center stack (a head-down display) in commercial vehicle applications. While the sample size is relatively small, as the resulting paper states, “For commercial goods delivery and navigational tasks, the results showed no significant difference between drivers using HUD and HDD, regardless of display arrangement sequence and driving load conditions.”

In a similar vein, a NHTSA-sponsored Virginia Tech study involving a Buick LaCrosse found that drivers spent less time looking at the HUD rather than the gauge cluster when prompted, but more time looking at the HUD than the gauge cluster when simply driving along. As for reaction rate in a simulated emergency scenario, the rate was identical between the HUD and the cluster, while the reaction time was actually a few tenths of a second longer for drivers looking at the HUD.

The head-up display was awesome when it first came to the automotive kingdom, thanks to Nissan in Japan and General Motors in North America, but we’ve reached the point where other technology that overcomes its downsides isn’t just available, it’s already implemented. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see fewer cars with HUDs in the near future, and while I’ll miss their cool factor, even my pre-algorithm nostalgic self must admit that it’s probably time we move on.

Top graphic image: Audi

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