Just because Tokyo at night is more brightly colored than a 64 crayon box of Crayolas doesn't mean that the intensity of its after-dark display should be emulated by its country's car manufacturers. I rented a new Nissan Sentra last week, which like many cars has an instrument panel that features a mix of analog and digital gauges. Unfortunately, the fuel and engine temperature gauges are in a round LCD display in the middle of the panel. The information is very hard to read under the best of circumstance, but at night, it is a disaster:
The Nissan orange is annoying enough to begin with, but the center display is so excessively bright that it is at once illegible and a constant distraction. I know car manufacturers test their new products extensively under just about all conceivable conditions. I've
wondered before whether they test during the day. Do they not test at night, either?
3 comments:
There's no kno to adjust the interior lighting?
I couldn't find it in the short time I had to react to the problem (i.e., drive off the lot and into traffic, while fumbling with unfamiliar controls) -- another design flaw. Plus, the dimmer would not have solved the problem. The relative brightness of the center circle was far beyond that of the rest of the instruments, which were set at an acceptable level. The picture accurately depicts what I saw.
I think the person to ask about this is Chris. Wasn't that the type of thing he tested at Toyota?
Post a Comment