Visteon displays range of production-ready, fully digital instrument clusters at CES

Automotive cockpit electronics major Visteon Corporation is highlighting its latest instrument cluster and display technology at CES 2017 in Las Vegas.

The company is showcasing a full range of production-ready, fully digital instrument clusters and displays that incorporate premium graphics and illumination, and highlight the enhanced styling freedom that digital clusters afford.

Keeping pace with the consumer electronics world, instrument clusters in vehicles are rapidly going fully digital. Larger, higher-resolution displays are becoming the primary interface with drivers and passengers as new mobility models and autonomous vehicles evolve. Fully reconfigurable instrument clusters are expected to represent up to 80 percent of the market within five years. Visteon was the first to market with this fully reconfigurable technology and remains the industry leader in all-digital instrument clusters.

“As more digital content comes into the cockpit, instrument clusters that were first largely mechanical and then evolved into electromechanical and hybrid devices are now transforming into fully digital display-based clusters,” said Visteon president and CEO Sachin Lawande. “There is also considerable interest in integrating displays more naturally into the design and materials of the instrument panel, using free-form shapes with no visible display active areas.”

At CES, Visteon is displaying a range of instrument clusters from entry level to premium, featuring the latest in large, high-resolution displays, including 3-D, all-digital, hybrid digital/analog and a cluster with integrated cameras for facial recognition and monitoring. Highlights include a prism display, which uses two 12.3-inch TFT displays with a semi-reflective “blade” between them.

Featured information displays include dual OLED (organic light-emitting diode) and dual-view displays that show different content based on viewing angle – such as navigation for the driver and video for the passenger.

Digital instrument clusters allow automakers to present new menus and information to drivers with over-the-air software updates, preventing clusters from becoming static and outdated throughout the vehicle’s life cycle. There is also a growing interest in technologies increasing the depth of the image in digital clusters, enabling 3-D effects, for a more immersive experience.

“The main advantage of all-digital displays is the capability to handle complex, diverse and ever-changing information,” Lawande said. “With connected and autonomous driving, we have to design in flexibility, as the new use cases are multiple and complex. This can only be delivered with basically a ‘blank canvas’ where the display can be designed as needed to accommodate new content.”

Visteon’s experience in graphics rendering, optics and illumination, plus its manufacturing expertise using sophisticated automation and clean-room techniques, aids in producing high-quality clusters and displays that recreate the consumer electronics experience in the vehicle.