Weatherman
Well-known member
I'd like to make a rather unusual proposal.
How about Nissan keep the various gages, but dump the incremental bar presentation? What I mean by this is that, for the temperature, state of charge and battery capacity displays, make them look similar to analog readouts - a continuous bar that increases or decreases in pixel length, but doesn’t have perceptible, discrete increments.
The unfortunate thing about the incremented bars is that they show an apparent precision, which implies a much greater level of accuracy in the readout than actually exists. It's like those digital thermometers, which measure to the nearest 10th of a degree, but have a + or - 2 degree margin of error. Most of the time, I'd just rather read a mercury thermometer, instead.
It's very easy to become overly fixated on the bars. When I sold my first LEAF, it wasn't because I had lost any of the capacity bars; it was because, for each mile I drove, the state of charge bars were disappearing a lot faster than I expected. Maybe the state of charge bars were giving an inaccurate reading on how much energy was still left in the battery? I don't know, and may never know. In any case, fixating on variations in the bars-lost-per-mile spooked me enough to sell the car.
How about Nissan keep the various gages, but dump the incremental bar presentation? What I mean by this is that, for the temperature, state of charge and battery capacity displays, make them look similar to analog readouts - a continuous bar that increases or decreases in pixel length, but doesn’t have perceptible, discrete increments.
The unfortunate thing about the incremented bars is that they show an apparent precision, which implies a much greater level of accuracy in the readout than actually exists. It's like those digital thermometers, which measure to the nearest 10th of a degree, but have a + or - 2 degree margin of error. Most of the time, I'd just rather read a mercury thermometer, instead.
It's very easy to become overly fixated on the bars. When I sold my first LEAF, it wasn't because I had lost any of the capacity bars; it was because, for each mile I drove, the state of charge bars were disappearing a lot faster than I expected. Maybe the state of charge bars were giving an inaccurate reading on how much energy was still left in the battery? I don't know, and may never know. In any case, fixating on variations in the bars-lost-per-mile spooked me enough to sell the car.