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I was just thinking about these purported studies this weekend.

My wife’s car has an analog speedometer in the left and a center digital display between the speedometer and the tach which can show many things, one of which is a nice big digital speed indicator.

When the digital display is showing something else it takes me 2x-3x as much time to ascertain the current speed from the speedometer.

I think the studies are possibly being influenced by people’s familiarity with speedometers in cars. If you asked someone to tell you the temperature in the room and gave them an analog gauge and a digital display, which one would be faster?

Once you acclimate to the digital display I’ve found I can read it faster and more precisely.

It may be possible to see “under 60” on the gauge faster than read “57” on the display, but I doubt even that. And when I’m trying to check or set my speed to be exactly 9 over the limit, the digital is much, much faster.




I think with enough time spent in a specific car, most drivers don’t really look at the numbers and more at the general direction of the dial. Basically your “under 60” example.

It’s facilitated if you mentaly divide in quadrants: you can identify the first bold tick above the horizontal middle line as 60 for instance, and it becomes extremely quick to know if you’re under, at, or above 60, at one two units of error at most.

You’ll also only need to remember two or three relevant positions.

I tbink digital is fine, I’d just see optimisations when on analog in this specific use case (but it needs to be center and big and clear, a small dial on the side is bothersome)




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