Is This the Dashboard of the Future?
Ford’s all-digital instrument display, debuting on the Ford GT, will minimize driver distraction.
Ford has just revealed a handful of new images and videos highlighting the 2017 GT’s new all-digital display. The display itself uses high contrast graphics wrapped in a genuinely sleek design, engineered to report only vital information in an effort to reduce driver distraction.
According to Ford Performance’s chief engineer, Jamal Hameedi, “driver focus and attention are key with such high performance. We’ve designed the GT with a sleek digital instrument display that changes depending on driving mode in ways that are important and usable to the driver.”
As one might expect, in Normal mode the display provides a relatively clutter-free view suited to a standard commute. The digital display features the vehicle’s speed front and center, with a sweeping rev counter above it. Fuel level and coolant temperature are displayed in the top left corner.
Where things get interesting is in Track, Wet, and V-Max modes: Track mode, like the McLaren P1, displays an image of the vehicle decreasing its ride height in sync with the car actually lowering, and graphically prioritizes revs and gear selection in the display. Coolant temperature, oil temperature, and oil pressure data—data that's critical in high performance environments—get far more play on the right side of the display.
Wet mode, while similar to Normal mode, graphically mimics the shine of a wet road underneath the speedometer. Setting the GT in V-Max mode, in accordance with its name, prioritizes speed and gear selection, with turbocharger boost, oil pressure, and oil and coolant temperatures displayed to the right of the indicated speed.
Check out the videos below to see what the digital display looks like in use.
