Your new car is going to come with a big infotainment screen. It’s pretty much inevitable. But what we also should be doing is adding more analog clocks to our cars because analog clocks are Good.
At this year’s New York International Auto Show, I took a peek into as many cars as I could (there weren’t that many). Nearly all of them had big screens in their center consoles, which, fine. But the few that featured analog clocks stood out.
I’m not that old, but I’m old enough that my classmates and I started getting our first cell phones in junior high and high school. We weren’t allowed to use the phones during school, thank God. Which meant that students couldn’t easily check the time on those phones, they had to use the big analog clocks stuck to the walls of the classrooms.
I remember people complaining that they couldn’t tell time from an analog clock and I was floored, y’all. I had always considered being able to tell time a very basic skill that you just learned. There was no why, you just did it.
Sticking analog clocks in cars is not only a classy look and a classy move, but it also reminds people how to actually tell time. Clocks are hundreds of years old and they’re still relevant, so let’s put them where we spend a lot of time: Inside cars.
From what I could tell, only Maserati, Mercedes, Lexus, Genesis and Kia put analog clocks in their cars. Let’s compare their center consoles with a few cars that only have screens.
No Analog Clocks
See how boring and uniform those look? All they have is a big screen with two climate vents.
Special shoutout to this Porsche Panamera, which had an analog second hand but digital numbers still. Get out of here with that crap.
Analog Clocks
Do you see how varied these interiors are? The analog clocks aren’t all fixed to one spot, they can be anywhere. The Lexus clocks aren’t even in the same spot in each of its cars!
More cars need analog clocks. They’re a nice statement piece and might actually re-teach people an apparently lost skill, for Christ’s sake. I know for a fact that when people yell about bringing back analog cars, they actually mean the clocks. Whatever else could they mean?