Those Ferranti-Packard mechanical displays are pretty cool-you have probably seen them at airports or on road signs-they have the interesting property that the display doesn’t change until energized.
They are nice because they are readible under all conditions-which isn’t the case with the vacuum-fluorescent displays in my car (you cannot see them in direct sunlight).
Has anyone ever used these displays in a car?
No.
They’re a bit noisy, so I doubt they’d see much acceptance for use in a car.
Unless your dashboard is entirely alpha-numeric with no analog gages or meters, these things wouldn’t even display the dashboard info very well.
link with better explanation?
Then que!
Might be better to use an LCD display and have it draw the flip-disc elements.
If the goals were readability in direct sunlight and not needing constant power, E-Ink might be a better choice. How often is your instrument cluster in direct sunlight, though? On every car I’ve had, it would take a pretty specific sun angle to hit the instruments directly. However, my cars mostly have had analog and LCD displays, not vacuum-flourescent, so even if the sun did hit them I don’t think it would be much of an issue.