I was responding to @Bullitt, who does seem to think it’s a matter of “can’t” (“it becomes a problem for all other nearby drivers and pedestrians”), which made me think that his experience with speedometer-glancing was significantly different from mine.
I can think of several possible reasons why it might be worse, some of which have already been mentioned by others in this thread (people find it distracting; hard to see through sunglasses); but I lack the experience to know whether they have merit.
Those little rectangular blind spot mirrors that I’ve ridden with for many miles? I’ve put them on my car lately, so my eyes don’t have to move far from the road ahead. I love them there too, and I am much safer because of them.
But my wife doesn’t like them. And I know several other people who don’t.
My speed, as I come over a hill / around a curve & there’s suddenly a cop sitting up ahead. Do I / how much do I need to brake.
We were doing a late night install; finished a little after 2am (which is also when the bars close) on a rainy night in the city. I know my headlights were on because there’s a 90° turn in the parking garage so I could clearly see them reflecting off of the wall in front of me.
A couple of blocks later I get pulled over; cop thought she had a drunk because I didn’t have my headlights on. I can only guess I rolled them to parking light position when I activated the turn signal. Parking light position still gives you dashboard lights so I didn’t have the interior clue & the ground was so bright & reflective from the road being wet & all of the city lights that I didn’t realize it that way, either. Of course that was the one night I was giving the boss a ride home; never did live that one down.
Until you need to replace one; old school mirrors were $25; I know of someone who had to replace one in a pickem’up twuck; well over $1000 with all of the electronics in it for turn signal, camera, heat, & extension out (for towing)
Is this speaking from personal experience or supposition? Of all the HUD’s I’ve ever experienced, I can’t imagine them being more distracting than just the standard dash. They’re low down, unobtrusive and generally pretty dim.
And if it does come from personal experience, is it an intrinsic nature of all HUDs and how you react to them or just the poor design of that particular HUD that could be improved with modifications?
In my Escape that light gives both false negatives and positives on occasion, making it useless. I always shoulder check anyway, which saved my ass once when the little light said it was clear and it wasn’t. I now completely ignore those lights. False positives are annoying, but false negatives get peolle killed. If it didn’t look ugly, I would tape over the lights so no one in my family is tempted to rely on them.
These features get added as added safety in addition to what was currently being done, but over time people lean on them more and more and forget about the active safety they learned earlier.
As for HUDs, they are simple technology that has been available for decades. I think it’s safe to assume that they are fairly rare because they offer marginal extra value for significant increased cost.
Can I be the guinea pig?
Before reading this thread I had no idea that Heads-Up was a thing for private cars. (I thought it was only for jet pilots.)
So I volunteer to be the test subject (guinea pig? lab rat? )–and here are my reactions, as a total newbie:
This thread contains 2 photos which show an HUD display.
Both pics leave me feeling “meh”–it may be okay, but not for me"
Post #5 shows the corvette speedometer. And my first reaction is: well, it looks okay,… in this specific instance.
But I notice that the display is shown against the background of the asphalt highway–a neutral, uniform color of gray. If the car was in city traffic, that display would be against a busy background of taillights, license plates, signs, arrows painted on the road, etc…Far less useful to me, I think. It would be more of a distraction, take longer to read than a regular dashboard speedometer, and take my attention away from my driving.
Post #29 shows: two speedometers, the legal speed limit, and a graphic display of two white lines and a car. This is very distracting to me, and I definitely would not want it. Those two white lines are NOT parallel to the white stripes of my lane, and the little graphic car looks like it’s going to crash into a car in the next lane. As a newbie, I find this display dangerously distracting. Those non-parallel white lines are confusing. And the whole thing is too “busy”, and distracting.
(Yes, I’m an old fart. I want to drive a car, not a computer. )
This is probably the biggest issue with HUDs as well. I worked on many patents for them about 15 years ago, and they all required some kind of extra optical features to be built into the windshield, to properly focus the image and avoid ghosting images because of double reflections and the like. Probably not 10x the cost of a regular windshield, but still more expensive.
The coolest use of a HUD I ever saw was in a high-end car (maybe a BMW?) that had an IR camera pointed down the road, and at night, it would display the image from that camera on the HUD, so you could see pedestrians from much further away. But this would be even more expensive, of course.
Yes, I assume cost is the largest problem with HUDs. As for distraction, etc., i expect there are good and bad HUD designs, and that good ones can work pretty well.
Besides the cost, there’s the demand side of the supply-demand equation. The public just hasn’t grown to want HUDs. When (If) that happens, demand will increase and costs will decrease.
While I agree with all that, I think the public is mostly unaware of HUDs unless they happen to rent a car that has one or if they can afford a car that would have it included. Car companies aren’t talking about HUDs in their ads, so the general public is oblivious to the fact that they are out there, and while I would think they would increase the safely of the driver, they can also be a distraction, which is not a good thing. When I buy my next vehicle, likely in the next year or two, I would like to have it available as an option, but I don’t think that’s very likely on a base-model Toyota Tacoma.
The freeway speed limit in Arkansas is 65. Despite warning signs and every thing except a gallows on the road, the only time I’ve been pulled over was when Mrs. Plant (v.2.0) was doing 90. And she got a mad as hell warning, not a ticket.
I think a HUD would be fine if it were off by default, and there was a button on the steering wheel that you press to turn it on briefly. So instead of glancing down at the speedometer, I keep my eyes on the road and press the button. Then when I release the button the HUD turns off. It could come on automatically when displaying emergency information like low oil pressure, but normally would be off. It seems to me (not having driven with one) that a HUD that’s on all the time is going to be distracting and potentially obscure something that the driver needs to see out on the road.
My Wifes car has the speed limit thing displayed on her regular dashboard. It is sometimes wildly off.
65 mph on an unimproved twisting gravel road (it leads to our house)? That’s Baja 1000 stuff. I might be able to do it on a very powerful dirt bike, IF I could even get it up to that speed without killing myself.
So, a lot of that is GPS/GIS. A lot of it is still wrong. But it is getting better. It’s best to trust yourself. Not your car.
I wasn’t saying people should drive around with headlights off because ambient lighting in cities is sufficient.
I was saying that people inadvertently drive around with their headlights off because their screens are glowing brightly and the road is well-lit enough that they have no cue to tell them they’ve forgotten their headlights.
Both those things are more prevalent now than in the e.g. 1970s. Which is why we see more folks driving with headlights off.
Do I / how much do I need to brake.