Screens overtaking cars is a controversial trend among enthusiasts, but it wasn’t always. I’ll risk my neck here and say I can’t imagine most people could watch the video below of a 1987 C4 Chevy Corvette‘s digital dash lighting up on ignition and not be mesmerized.
There was a time when these digital clock-esque readouts and bar-graph speedometers made a car cooler, not more complicated. My girlfriend and I have been going through Star Trek: The Next Generation lately (she’s the expert, I’m the newbie) and I get a similar feeling seeing the LCARS interfaces in that, or, say, NERV computers in Neon Genesis Evangelion, as I do observing this old Vette’s cluster. The mixture of colors, Eurostile typeface, and emphasis on words rather than just icons alone blend so well. It’s definitely busy, but somehow not to the degree that it’s hard to understand.
It is, however, pretty hard to see in sunlight, and that’s one of the reasons I really appreciate this video. This is frankly one of the clearest looks at this instrument cluster most of us are likely to get, for a variety of reasons. Even with the panel’s matte texture, these can be challenging to read with the sun beaming down. Funnily enough, Gran Turismo 7 recreates this phenomenon brilliantly; the C4’s dash is damn near illegible in sunny conditions in that game. (It’s also slow to respond, with typical, old LCD ghosting behavior. The attention to detail in GT7 just blows me away sometimes, and you can see what I mean in the embed below at about the 4:30 mark.)
There’s a historical value to this footage, too. How many C4 Vettes are still out there in the wild, with their digital instrument clusters in complete working order and no burnt-out pixels? With time, sunlight chars the polarizing film GM laid over the readouts, and the connections between PCBs eventually corrode. Rehabilitating one of these units is not a trivial task, as an informative piece from Chevy Hardcore explains.
That’s why seeing one of these working in full HD is a rare joy. The only thing better would be to watch those bars climb with the RPMs. I have to laugh that GM still insisted on an analog odometer, though. This particular C4 appears to have done over 111,000 miles, which isn’t too bad at all for an almost 40-year-old car. Perhaps this owner has somehow managed to keep their car’s original instrument cluster in pristine condition, but I’d be inclined to think they’ve done the necessary work to keep it looking showroom-fresh. In any case, kudos where it’s deserved.
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