A Flexible dashboard panel for a small electric vehicle

The dashboard panel is a fundamental component in any vehicle because it provides information to the driver about the current vehicle status. This information is necessary to comply with the law, e.g., to drive below speed limits, but also to other ends such as maintenance needs, current autonomy and operational status of internal components. Conventional dashboards use dedicated gauges that are fixed and cannot be changed easily. This conflicts with the current trend towards vehicles that are tailored to the customer at delivery time or that can be reconfigured during their lifetime, since modifications in the dashboard may be required. To cope with this trend, this paper proposes a new concept of dashboard, based on a hardware/software solution, using soft gauges implemented on a high resolution screen, thus being fully reconfigurable from design to delivery time or even during the vehicle lifetime. It can easily accommodate changes in the vehicle subsystems configuration but also provide different aesthetic options to the user. The proposed dashboard has been successfully applied to an experimental electric vehicle.