There is nothing on the dash that i ever need to know this very instant. So i don’t think there’s any significant safety hazard in having to glance down to see it. I would think anything that’s more distracting would be less safe.
My guess is that HUDs can be designed to be more or less distracting than the traditional display they supplement, and safety is more about the overall design than about exactly where the information is displayed.
(I had a somewhat recent Ford with an incredibly busy display, including pretty leaves that slowly grew if you drove “efficiently” and fell away if you spent more gas. So every time i braked sharply, there was a flurry of leaves trying to distract me. Like, in any potentially emergency situation. THAT was a badly designed display, and it took me more than a month to learn how to turn off the leaves and ignore other badly designed parts of the display. )
As I indicated upthread, I’m generally aware of my speed, and don’t exceed the speed limit unintentionally. I don’t have oil pressure or an engine that overheats, but when I did, the red light on the dash caught my attention more or less immediately. My turn signals make a little clicking noise. My high beams are usually on auto, which works surprisingly well. I’m not anti-HUD for those who like it. It’s just not for me.
That’s why I was skeptical about the HUD/navigation package that my wife wanted to get with our car. We ended up getting it and it’s nice. Not amazing, but nice. (The turning lane information is clearly more useful to me than it is to LSLGuy.)
I’m sure there will come a point 5 years from now when the in-dash navigation looks like something out of The Flintstones compared to the state-of-the-art, but c’est la vie.
I’m with @puzzlegal on this one. In all my years of driving, I’ve never considered it a problem that I had to glance down at the dashboard while driving.
If I’m driving under conditions where I can’t even look away from the road for a split second, my speed should probably be determined by what’s safe under current conditions and not by what my speedometer says.
I can’t even remember the last time I saw a low oil pressure or overheating engine light while driving. But if I did, it’s not like I could do anything about it in the next second or two.
High beams, turn signals, or hazard lights would only be on because I turned them on, and I wouldn’t need to be alerted to the fact “this very instant.”
I’d it safe to assume you drive a fully electric vehicle?
Unless you don’t care about paying for a replacement engine after yours has overheated, any car with an ICE needs to inform the driver of engine temp and oil pressure. The red idiot light down on the dash is often not noticeable and can turn on only when it’s too late. One example is on a bright sunny day with the sun in your eyes. And for overheating, you definitely want to know that the temps are climbing before the heat has reached a critical point.
My beloved Jeep died last October because it was a bright sunny day and the temps climbed too fast because the Jeep had taken a rock to the radiator. A connecting rod bent. The engine was toast.
In general, any device that helps you keep your eyes on the road — or put another way eliminates the need for you to take your eyes off of the road — is definitely safer. Definitely. Heat is generally not a safety concern but it is a cost concern.
The trick is having the right information displayed in the HUD, and not too much info. Hopefully the amount of HUD information is configurable. People have different capacities to process the quantity of available information.
Generally speaking, the option to have HUDs is safer.
It’s all about timing. What happens when your eyes are off the road? Did that minivan with the mattress tied to the roof lose its load? When you ride a motorcycle like I did commuting daily for nearly 40 years, you look at traffic and potential hazards much differently than drivers safe in their cars.
At freeway speeds of 65 mph, when your eyes are off the road for 1 second your car has traveled nearly 100 feet. It’s all about what happens during that 100 feet. Most of us, and we all do it, right?, have been fortunate that nothing happened during that 100 feet.
You need to know your vehicle speed and the speed limit this very instant? Unless I’ve just braked sharply, my speed is pretty much what it was several seconds ago. Speed limits change even less often. I turned those lights on, and don’t need the display to tell me. Besides, there’s this clicking noise with the turn signals, and i can see whether or not my high beams are on.
Low oil pressure and high engine temps are critical, but
neither light has come on in many years.
the last time one came on, i noticed the red light
it will take several seconds to do anything about it, anyway.
I certainly wouldn’t want my engine temp or oil pressure always in my field of view. I think that would reduce safety. If i had a heads up display, i agree that a red light alerting me to look at the gauge on the dash would be useful. But that doesn’t feel like a compelling reason to get a HUD.
My guess is that if i had one, I’d like it. But it’s not a feature i am hankering for. I’d much rather get an optionally-on rear camera (optionally on when going forward, that is) or that surround camera thing that makes it super easy to park.
If I was King insta-clear windshields and rear windows would be mandated by law. Humans are shortsighted and stupid.
With the display limitations and the customer expectations of the 1980s that’s not surprising. Here in 2024 both those things are wildly different. Analog dials can easily be portrayed on digital displays. And often are. As the various pix in this thread show.
The problem is that it does cost a bunch extra per car. When it’s a multi-thousand dollar option, how many people buying $20K stripper cars will spring for it?
The HUD display produces polarized light. If you wear conventional non-polarized sunglasses the HUD display is no more affected than is the outside world. With polarized glasses the display is dimmed depending on how you hold your head.
Polarized glasses are incompatible with airplane displays, so I’ve never worn them. But I did keep a cheapo pair of drugstore sunglasses in my car for the odd occasion I forgot my real ones. Confused the heck outta me the fist time I put them on and the car’s HUD brightness was greatly reduced and highly variable as I moved my head.
IMO nope. @puzzlegal has it. Those are things you should know in generalities, but are not things you need instant access to. Of course that assumes your driver is actually paying some attention to anything but their phone call and the music.
My car’s front facing camera reads the speed limit signs as they go by.
A critical issue that has been brought up here by various posters is that if cars are going to have nav systems in them, and especially nav systems tied into HUDs, then those nav systems need to be kept online and up to date for the life of the car at no additional charge to the consumer. Like the insta-clear windshield story at the top of my post, we can’t let cheapness on the part of later car owners put dangerous false info into their faces. Which they will mindlessly follow to everyone’s detriment.
Good luck with that. Some drivers need a hand to come out of the dashboard ans slap some sense into them.
I regularly see drivers without headlights well after dark. And I don’t mean that “civil twilight” bullshit.
Back when the instruments weren’t glowing screens, lotta times the first clue that you had forgotten your headlights was looking down at your gauges and seeing a black mass of nothingness. A ha!.
With glowing screens, that reminder is now gone. In many areas the overall lighting level is such that your headlights don’t add all that much.
Whenever any driver takes their eyes off of the road to check any of those (speed, temp, lights on or off, etc), it becomes a problem for all other nearby drivers and pedestrians. 100 feet every full second…
Motorcycling may be an extreme example that many licensed drivers can’t even relate to. But the principle applies to car drivers, although things don’t happen as quickly for car drivers as they do for motorcyclists. And they certainly don’t have the life-threatening consequences.
I’ve ridden a motorcycle for over 200,000 miles in my 40 years, mostly in commute rush hour traffic in and near San Francisco. Never had an accident. There’s no HUD on a motorcycle but I did have blind spot mirrors. They removed my need to turn my head to check my blind spots. They allowed me to keep my eyes on the road. The principle applies, regardless of what you’re driving, or riding.
If I can’t take my eyes off the road for long enough to glance down at my speedometer, then I can’t take my eyes off the road for long enough to glance up at my rear-view mirror, or sideways at my side-view mirror.
It’s not a matter of “can’t”, these are convenience features that provide marginal improvements but almost all of car evolution for the last 50+ years have been the slow accretion of marginal quality of life improvements that, over time, lead to real meaningful changes in how we experience driving.
Pop most people in a 1970s car and they can still drive it no problem with an acceptable standard of safety and many people enjoy that experience and great for them but a lot of people will miss tiny things like backup cameras and automatic emergency brakes and built in nav etc. and a lot of them provably also decrease accident rates.
Is putting the speed in the HUD instead of the dash not that much benefit to some people? Definitely. But like, I don’t see an argument for why it would be worse. Why not minimize the distance your eyes need to move when you’re checking the speed? What’s the harm? If this were a $20,000 feature, then yeah, I can see more careful consideration but I’ve seen cars where it’s $3000 to go up a trim level to include a HUD among a bunch of other features so it’s ultimately a small fraction of the total car price which is only going to go down over time.
Speaking of looking at sideview mirrors, ~10 years ago, cars started including a little light on the sideview mirror that showed whether it was safe to merge and new Kia/Hyundai models along with some other cars have a feature where when you put the turn signal on, part of the dash displays a camera view from the side of your car so you can check if its safe to merge without turning your neck.
Features like that are mandatory for me for my next car purchase because these little tiny safety features are important to me.
And again, this is only talking about the “old school” HUD that can only display information in a fixed spot. “AR HUD” that is able to place information on the road in front of you should, IMHO, be an essential feature anyone should look for if they do any meaningful quantity of automated driving.
