What Are Your Favorite Car Gauges And Instrument Clusters?

So much time is spent talking about the exterior design of cars, yet most of the time car ownership doesn’t involve looking at the outside of it. No, the part that’ll be staring in your face for every mile you drive your car is the one that doesn’t get as much recognition as it should.

Subconsciously, the instruments are what connect you to the soul of your ride. Today, essentially every vehicle has a rectangular video screen to communicate your car’s information to you, and this uniformity is something that didn’t exist in years past. Most of my favorite gauge clusters were ones that were not only unique but perfectly fit the personality of the car- here are some examples.

Porsche’s “five circle” cluster has become iconic for good reason: it’s a no-nonsense presentation of information that is befitting of the cold, calculating nature of these precision machines. It also gives you a feeling of prestige even if you’re driving the cheapest Macan to see almost the same instruments as a 911 GTS Turbo Whatever in front of you.

The C4 Corvette’s reputation is finally getting the rehabilitation that it deserves. At the time of its introduction in 1983, it really was “the most advanced vehicle on the planet.”

Mere gauges with needles were not going to cut it in a car that was giving us a true glimpse of what we thought the year 2000 would hold. You could change the readouts to what you wanted as well, proving that this was a driver-focused machine unlike any ‘Vette that had come before.

The first Honda Prelude of 1979 was an interesting mix of sportiness and luxury, and it seemed to balance these qualities well as a “sports car for grownups” as Rocky Balboa’s coach told us.

Even inside, the Prelude had a solution to the whole tach/speedometer priority conundrum that I thought was quite interesting and no other car (other than the Fiat 500, I believe) seems to have latched on to. Both of these critical gauges were concentric, with the tachometer inside of the speedometer, and major warning lights covering the axis. So much packed neatly into a small space.

Citroens of the seventies and eighties hold a special place in my heart for their uncanny weirdness; it’s like aliens from Mars that had never seen a car before came down and designed the instruments. Even one of their tamer creations of the time- the GSA- did not disappoint.

It looks like the bridge of a starship from a sci-fi movie, with a big schematic of the car and all sorts of illuminated bullet points for trouble spots. This dominates the instruments, pushing the tach and speedometer (plus minor gauges) into little bathroom-scale-like windows with numbers on illuminated rotating drums. I don’t want to get into switchgear at this point, but I will say that those cylindrical satellite pods floating off the side of the instrument panel look like they’d make great fidget boxes if you could get some from a junkyard.

Subaru also once had the guts to do “weird” for many of their cars, and the wedge-shaped XT coupe was a perfect example.

Thankfully, the gauge cluster lived up to the promise of the wild exterior. The “car” shape sat on a “road” formed by the graphic bar tachometer on one side and the mirror-image turbo boost gauge on the other. Also, if you raised the XT on its height-adjustable air suspension, that little graphic “car” in the center raised up as well.

The only way it could have gotten better is if you had a button on top of the shifter that fired laser-graphics out of the car shape on the screen. Use the Force, Luke!

The whole interior (and exterior too, if we’re being honest) feels like Subaru looking at Citroen and saying “hold my beer.”

What’s fun about the screens in today’s cars is that they could replicate many of these old clusters. Why can’t more manufacturers have fun with it?

What gauges and dash layouts hold special attraction or fascination for you? Let us know!