A scif-fi future car and its gauges

Got a little downtime at work so I drew up an idea I've had knocking about in my head about what the gauge cluster of a future car might look like. The discharge/regen gauge that some current electric cars have (like the electric SLS) is on the right track but it's just the beginning. More detail about where energy is going becomes important, while revs become irrelevant and temperatures become footnotes that a warning light will suffice for (for real this time).

Here's how I imagine the dash looking on a CX75-like supercar, say 5 years from now. It has a newer-technology (maybe dual-carbon?) but small-ish battery that offers maybe 150 miles of range, direct electric drive, a supercapacitor, and an aircraft APU.

Mechanical gauges would be dead by now, so this is a computerized dash. I still think an analog speedometer is useful, especially on the sporty car, so there's something like that on the right. In the middle is an advanced discharge/regen gauge, on the left are energy store levels, and along the bottom are the drive mode indicator and a space for indicator & warning symbols. It may seem a bit skeumorphic to reserve space for symbols, but I think the cluster will be more intuitive and easier to read at a glance if everything has its own place. "dynamic" info could be displayed just below the discharge/regen gauge and above the reserved bottom row. Maps, media, and other non-critical stuff would be better suited for a center-console display.

The regen/charge meter is pretty simple, a bar on the left means energy is being harvested from regen braking, a bar on the right means energy is being expended through the wheels. The exception is the APU, a bar on the left for that means that energy is being harvested from the turbine to charge the battery and/or supercap.

The very top bar is a cumulative gauge that works like today's simple discharge/regen gauges. The R-brake value is the automatic regen setting - how much energy harvesting you get when you lift off the accelerator (can't call it gas or throttle anymore!) 0 and it coasts like a bicycle, 5 and you get something similar to a high-compression ICE's engine braking at high revs, all the time. Technically more might be possible, but it wouldn't be very safe to allow this.

In this scenario the car is cruising the highway in electric-only mode, using very little energy, all from the battery. The car has drive modes D, N and R, accompanied by power modes E, H and P...those should all be easy enough to figure out

Next I'll post some more scenarios.

Just want to say, the font looks very 80's.

I like 80's when it comes to cars Play the Knight Rider theme in the background if it helps

Now our driver's been cruising the highway for a while and the battery is getting a bit worn down, and he wants a full battery for where he's going, so he switches to hybrid mode. The turbine is most efficient at high load, so it's running flat-out all the time in hybrid mode, charging the battery as aggressively as possible. It'll only stop when you switch back to electric mode, either manually or automatically when the battery's topped up.

The only thing the car of the future will have is a speedometer and a CEL. You might as well give up on the rest of them.

^A normal idiocracy-mobile, perhaps, that's why I did a more interesting car

Now our driver's made it to the track and has put the car in Performance mode, and this is what rocketing out of a corner with the accelerator flat and push-to-pass held down looks like:

In performance mode, efficiency is an afterthought, and any regen energy tops up the supercap before it starts charging the battery - better to have some extra power available.

And this is what maximum braking looks like:

More regen braking might be possible but it wouldn't be safe. It needs to be controllable. Brake-by-wire could achieve this but this car's only 5 years in the future, nobody's comfortable with that yet

My Jeep already has a strictly digital speedometer. I usually pick a medium sized font number in the center of the panel.

see.. I fore see there being no set gage cluster. You are going to get a screen in front of the driver that can be reconfigured at will. You can put "gages" where you want them, in what style you want (mechanical looking to Star Trekesque) and in an emergency, the issue will move itself front and centre where it can hopefully get your attention

Why bother with the screen at all? Hud for speed, some warning lights, and Bluetooth connectivity for your phone.

HUDs aren't very readable in bright daylight, that's why even cars that have them only use them as a secondary display repeating information that can be seen in the main gauge cluster.

The dash from Knight Rider comes to mind here.