To De-clutter Car Cockpits, Just Say ‘No’

DETROIT – Just because automakers can put something in a vehicle cockpit doesn’t mean they should.

That cautionary advice comes from Matt Jackson. He’s an aerospace consultant who at a Society of Automotive Engineers event discusses the future design of airplane cockpits.

He speaks with WardsAuto afterwards about how that might apply to the auto industry, especially when it comes to making driver display arrays more user-friendly.

“Automotive can learn from aerospace,” he says on the sidelines of the annual SAE World Congress & Exhibition here.

“You’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Why am I putting this in a vehicle, and what are consumers getting out of it?’ versus ‘Let’s just put it in,’ which is what I’m seeing in a lot of cars today.”

Then again, sometimes it’s not that an automaker shouldn’t include a particular informational feature in a vehicle.

“Rather, it is a question of where it is, how it is shown and how the driver interacts with it,” says Jackson, a senior consultant for Canadian software provider Presagis.

For instance, he raps infotainment screens with deep-drill menus, branding those as driver-distraction enablers. “De-clutter the screen rather than overload it.”

He likes that Volkswagen Group has put a compact information screen in front of the driver. But he thinks it’s inadvisable for a VW-group brand such as Audi to include a 4-color digital map right there in the driver’s sight line.

“That’s too much; it causes driver problems. No offense, we stopped doing that a long time ago in airplanes. A plain layout may not look as attractive, but it works better.”

He’s also not a fan of dials that go blue with illumination. “Blue is a terrible color at night because it can cause eyestrain. But what’s the color you see in car cockpits a lot? Blue, because a designer thought it was cool.”

Another tenet of airplane cockpit design that applies to car interiors: “Make sure you are not presenting too much information at one time,” Jackson says.

Airplane cockpits went from a simple display of mechanical gauges in the early days to a sprawl of gauges, dials, switches and monitors in the late 1960s. “It was very intimidating,” Jackson says.  

It reached a point that in addition to a pilot and co-pilot, the crew included a flight engineer to help monitor all the information on display.

Computer software has helped scale back on that. As flying has become more automated, pilots need less information than they would if they were operating an aircraft completely on their own.

“Pilots are amazing problem solvers, and we still need them, but planes today pretty much fly themselves,” Jackson says. “It’s kind of like point and go.”

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