[masraum]

Originally Posted by RWebb

This is close to optimum. The only issues are that the gauges are too black and the steering wheel block your view of some gauges.

I loved the dash in my old '88. I'm tall-ish and don't sit way back, so my view was very different from the photo above. I turned the tach and speedo counter-clockwise so the redline was straight up and the speedo was turned the same amount. Those two were the two that were the most impacted by the steering wheel, and turning the gauges resolved that issue.

Originally Posted by JackDidley

I hate the one in my Cayman. 2 speedometers, no oil pressure or oil temp. I do not see the logic.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that I hate it, but I think it would have been a huge improvement to enable more output on the small electric display at the bottom of the speedo. I think it should include oil level and pressure and maybe temp (although not as vital with a water cooled car if you have water temp).
Apparently, you could put a 996 gauge pod in 986s to get the rest of the gauges, but I don't think there's anything similar for 987 and up. Not only that, but on the older 987s and 2.7L, you could put the dip stick back in, but on mine, with the 3.4L, I'm screwed, no way to add a dipstick.

I suspect Porsche did away with the oil pressure and level gauges for the same reason they did in the miata and almost everything else these days. My miatas had oil pressure gauges, but they were what most of us would consider "fake". As long as the car had something like 5 or 7 psi of pressure, the gauge showed "normal". If you dropped below that bottom threshold, the gauge would go to 0. It was basically an idiot light that looked like a gauge. I guess the problem was that so many folks don't understand how oil pressure works, that Mazda had lots and lots of service calls for oil pressure where there was no issue. I know most of us "get it" but we are probably also a tiny minority of Porsche owners. There are probably plenty of Porsche owners that don't/wouldn't understand oil temp, pressure or level gauges if they had them. Shoot, any of you that have ever spent much time on the tech board have probably read the posts from folks that have had a 911 for X time (sometimes years) and have never revved the motor higher than 4k.

Originally Posted by JavaBrewer

We recently rented an Audi A4 from Silvercar - here is one of the dash options... (not my photo)



I can see the iPhone/Android generation really liking this. I don't.

We rented a silvercar about a year ago. I really liked the dash and the ability to change it to show what I wanted. I wouldn't want to own one when it fails though.