I can shift a M/T by sound and feel or speedometer but I like having a tachometer as another gauge out of only 2 to check. At my age I feel the need to stay focused and involved with my driving.
I would like to have a temperature, ammeter, oil pressure and gas gauge in a car. When I was in 6th grade in 1953, we had a 1949 Dodge. We were on a trip and I was in the back seat on the left side. I noticed the oil pressure gauge fluctuating all over the scale. I brought this to my dadās attention. He immediately pulled off the road and checked the oil. It wasnāt visible on the dipstick. My dad and I hiked a mile up.the highway, where he bought two.quarts of oil. We hiked back to the car and we stopped at the station and added another quart of oil to bring it to the full level. My allowance was 50Ā¢ a week, but I got an additional quarter that week for saving the engine and our vacation.
The year before, I noticed the ammeter gauge was on the too of the scale. Again, we were on a road trip. I mentioned this and my dad became concerned but we did make it to our destination. The next morning, the battery wouldnāt turn the engine over. The battery had an internal short.
Neither the fluctuating oil pressure or the high charging rate would have been detected by warning lights.
I miss these gauges. My 1947 Pontiac, 1948 Dodge, 1950 Chevrolet pickup, 1954 Buick and 1955 Pontiac had a full set of gauges. No vehicle I have owned that was a 1965 or later included these gauges. My dad owned a 1963 Studebaker Lark and it had all the gauges. The ammeter gauge tipped him off to a faulty voltage regulator that allowed the alternator to overcharge the battery. A few things were better in cars in the good old days.
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I also like a full set of gaugeās unless they lie. I had a plymouth one time with a full set & one time it over heated the temp. gauge was reading normal I saw steam & could smell it I pulled over & opened the hood & saw the bottom radarter hose had come off but the wsa reading normal.
Hiā¦
I completely agree with that statement. But add that of all the gauges I might wish the maker to include in my car (Speedometer of course, block temp, oil pressure, oil temp, tranny fluid temp, charge-discharge status of battery, current and average mpg, outside air temp, etc) the tachometer is the least useful. Especially in an automatic, and even more so with a CVT. And bet if you ask 100 drivers (outside of the cartalk forum) if they use the tach and what they use it for or learn from it the vast majority will report they pay not attention to it and have no answer for what use it is to them.
What prompted my post is that my 2015 Forester (and many many newer cars have a huge amount of the instrument panel occupied by the tachā¦ space and cash that could put basic gauges (block temp and oil pressure) they left out, ones that I bet youād rather have.
I didnāt actually tally how many ā¦ and yes, Iām corrected if I implied NO newer cars have temp gauges.
But earlier you wrote ā
quote=āFoDaddy, post:42, topic:147771ā]
Show me a new car that doesnāt have a temp gauge. I canāt think of one that doesnāt
[/quote]
The images of dashboards that you posted yourself shows many that donāt have temp gauges. And when you earlier asked me to show you one newer car that had no temp gauge, I had already listed my 2015 Forester, my Mitsubishi, and now add one more: My grandsonās 2013 Kia has no temp gauge. Voltage and oil pressure are even rarer even on the dashes you grabbed images of.
But back to my main point, if you donāt mind:
You and I think agree weād like more info rather than less, and see value in temp, oil pressure, etc. Can you agree (which really was my main point) that of all of those the tach is usually the least used and least usefulā¦ doesnāt justify taking up half the instrument clusterā¦ let alone displacing temp and oil pressure?
Which ones?
When I said " I canāt think of one that does." That meant I wasnāt aware of any new cars that donāt have a temperature gauge. But I like to learn things, so thatās what prompted me to look up a bunch of gauge clusters on new cars, thatās also why I chose to look up different kinds of vehicles from different makes, including fairly common cars that people are likely to buy.
That is true. It seems that trucks and truck-based SUVās are more likely to have them. While most cars have a speedometer, tach, fuel, and temperature gauge.
Iām afraid I cannot agree. My daily driver has a manual transmission, I use the tach frequently. My F-150 is an automatic, so I will admit itās far less useful there, but it also comes with a nearly complete instrumentation anyway,. My TR6 is a manual obviously, and since it requires frequent, nay ,constant mechanical repair/upkeep these days, a tach is essential for trouble-shooting purposes.
I will say that that for most people who arenāt enthusiasts or who see their car as an appliance and donāt care how they work or to what to degree they are functioning; a tach is probably something that they donāt want or need, and they receive little benefit from.
I agree. I also have to say, however, that you can take my manual-shift transmission and tachometer from my cold, dead hands.
I donāt need any Internet-connected car that wonāt start if it doesnāt get itās daily update check from the manufacturer. CVTās are fine for most people and THEY DONāT NEED A TACH, but I want a synchromesh with a stick in the floor (certainly not in the dash; Iām looking at you Honda). Automatic-shift transmissions are also fine for people with family cars and those who would rather a computer drive their car anyway.
Yes, my selection of available new automobiles is getting slimmer each year as the world moves towards self-driving vehicles, CVTās, and āluxury sportā stupidity. Nothing weighing over 3,500lbs. is truly a sports car and is instead a really powerful, bedless truck. Sure, itās got 550HP and all that, but making an SUV go really fast doesnāt make it a sports car. The Saturn V went quite fast and produced a lot of gās to boot, but it wasnāt a sports car. It was a stack of greyhound buses full of rocket fuel; no fun to drive and a real pain to even ride in.
I donāt want a car without a tachometer, but putting one on the dash wonāt trick me, either. Do they think Iām dumb enough to think that slapping a large, central tach on the dash will somehow hide the CVT and drive-by-wire safety features that will intervene if I do anything other than stay in the exact center of my lane? I actually like CVTās and have been pushing for their adoption for decades, but I donāt want one in my car, thank you very much.
I dislike the long-standing fantasy in the automotive culture where each sucker for āsportsā cars pretends that theyāre secretly a race car driver. I also despise people that drive fast and dangerously on public roads; may they all be busted repeatedly by the police. However, I still want to DRIVE my car and I define a car as something with wheels, an engine, manual-shift drivetrain, and rack-and-pinion steering. A computer for engine management is fine, but thatās all; that computer does NOT need servos attached to the pedals or steering.
Iām not an unknown race hero waiting for my day to shine, but neither am I dead. When I die, you can put me in a self-driving hearse and I wonāt care. Until then, Iāll do the driving and Iāll have a tach on my dash.
General Aviation airplanes have tachometers that record āengine hoursā, where 1 engine hour is achieved with the engine turning at 2400 rpm. With the engine idling, there is less ātach timeā being recorded as compared to clock time. Also found in light planes (usually) is a āHobbs meterā which records actual clock hours as soon as oil pressure is up.
Something that I have been saying Bluetooth came out. You MUST maintain situational awareness of the road whilst driving, if one is focused on social awareness, even if that person is in the car (although reasonable passengers in a reasonable state of mind would not force emotional distractions on the driver of the car they were in ) , one is less aware of the situation they are in on the road (or will be in microseconds) . And yes when I used to get close to an suv and I saw the driver had sher hand to sher head I would add a bit of space and speed when I passed sher car. ( and call me paranoid but I used to give the same wide berth to Volvos as I now do Subarus, I am just guessing but they may be the safe cars drivers choose after they prove themselves to be unsafe drivers)
Now let me add my thoughts on the original topic.
From a non car techie Point of view: Tachs would give an indication if oneās idle speed were abnormal for the ambient temp, if a non techie were to be that observant.
And on the dash board screen/nav display/ backup display/radio display; why not make it programmable to dislpay OBD-II data? If one wants that data visible why force one to find a place to position oneās tablet to see the info live with an addon OBD-II device ?
Hi Wavy.
Well we seem to agree for sure that laws requiring hands-free cell talking donāt address the bigger issue of riskā¦which isnāt where are the driverās hands, but where is his/her attention. My traffic expertās opinion , at the risk of repeating myself, was that it was feel-good legislation that actually my have made matters worse.
You wrote in partā¦
āā¦ and call me paranoid but I used to give the same wide berth to Volvos as I now do Subarus, I am just guessing but they may be the safe cars drivers choose after they prove themselves to be unsafe drivers)ā¦ā
Hey! 
Iāve driven Subarus for 20 years, and both my record and my super low insurance rates would seriously challenge your presumption of my driving safety. In fact insurance underwriters rate Subaru drivers/owners as safer than many others ā¦ and they just go by the real world dataā¦not impressions, gut feelings, or speculations about what kind of persons buy Subarus. 
Back to main topicā¦
Lookā¦ I find the tach behavior on my CVT interesting but not usefulā¦and still say the vast majority of drivers get nothing useful from the tach, and there,s little or no logical justification for having it on their dashboard, let alone, even if there, occupying such a large and visually prominent piece of real-estate.
Yesā¦as many have postedā¦you CAN glean some useful info off a tachā¦ Yeah, even with an automatic tranny. But my point was and is that even for most of us in this bubble of car savvy folks we could easily live without them.
I still bet most of you if you had my 2015 Forsterās dashboard would gladly give up its space hogging 5-inch diameter tach in exchange for a temperature gauge, oil pressure, whatever, or maybe even just larger more readable fuel level (which is squashed down into a tiny black an light gray LCD display.
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Not at all. smart good drivers also drive safer vehicles ! But what are your own observations re Subaru drivers and note I am in westchster ny our experiences may vary
So if I continue to drive my very reliable older vehicle, that means Iām not a āsmart good driverā . . . ?
So I should just give up on that vehicle in order to be āsmart goodā . . . ?
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Lets see , Wavy says beware of Volvo drivers and Subaru drivers and then says smart drivers have safer vehicles .
Wavy , any other brands you want to insult today?
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Not insulting any makes of cars, just my own observations. It is actualy more of a recognition that those cars have an excellant rep for safety . My comment was on the drivers of said vehicles. Choosing them is not a bad option, just smart.
Of course not. Just an opinion that poor drivers have chosen āsaferā cars based on their own past experience, mea cupla :no evidence provided.
But would such drivers not try to choose a car with an excellent safety rep??
well, hereās some good news . . .
If I were to buy a new vehicle, it would have many safety features which my current vehicle lacks
Thus . . . pretty much any new vehicle is going to be safer than the vehicle itās replacing, which is probably several years old
Unless youāre lucky enough to be able to afford a new BMW, Lexus, Benz, Cadillac, etc. every 2 -3 years
mostly true but i am NOT a believer in the newer drive by wire systems, maybe when I get to āthat ageā but for now I just pay attention. I am sticking with my plain vanilla 2012 Honda Accord EXLuntl the new corrolla can take me home from the concert on its own in a non scary maner 
I remember years and years ago a radio panel discussion among several supposed auto safety experts on the pros and cons of auto safety features. There was some substantial agreement and some substantial disagreement. In the dissagreement department there was a debate about the statistic that āall things being equalā the heavier vehicle is safer ā¦ at least in a two-car collision. One catch was that thereās never āall things equalā and a well-safety designed small car might protect you better than a not so well designed heavy car. The other catch was interesting from one expert. He claimed that from a public-safety-policy point of view it made no sense to encourage heavy cars as whatever increase in safety it might be buying for the heavy carās driver it was at the expense of more injuries to light car drivers. And that if you succeeded in getting everyone into heavy cars that would cancel all the individual gains too.
One memorable point made was that in terms of engineering Corvettes should be among the very safest cars on the road, but statistically (ask the insurance underwriters) they are among the most dangerous. That brings in the fuzzy issue of what sort of drivers tend to buy what cars.
The one thing, IIRR the ONLY thing, they ALL agreed on was that theyād rather be riding in a car with an extremely skilled extremely conservative safe driver in a car with poor safety engineering than in the best-safety-engineered car on the road with a poor/dangerous driver.
Thereās some truth to that . . .
However, there are situations where that extremely safe drive gets t-boned or rear-ended and there wasnāt a darn thing he could have done to prevent it . . . unless he had stayed home that day
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I agree. And I like the safety features. Some like lane drift warnings and adjacent-car-in-blind-spot warnings seem really useful. And backup cameras have been solidly proven to reduce backup dings or even more serious things like backing up over your own child in the driveway.
But thereās an interesting thing that goes on where us humans, once we are given some protection/increased-increased-safety-margin TEND to āuse it upā and end up not much safer. Malcom Gladwell explains that here:
Hereās Malcomās whole original article that the above is based on:
Case in point: A fleet of cabs in Germany had half the cars with anti-lock brakes, the other identical half not. At first the group driving the ABS cars DID see a reduction in accidentsā¦ but it faded away. Explanation: As they developed more confidence in their ability to stop the cut back on the following safety margins, etc.
So by that idea, unconsciously maybe someone who learns to trust his drifting-out-of-lane warning system maybe decides to keep driving when getting drowsy rather than, as he would have in his old car without that feature, pulling into the rest area or pulling into a motel for the night.
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