maxnix wrote:I alwasy wonder why the USDM G50 didn't get the shift position indicator in the intrument cluster.
Same here. It would be a nice little touch.
Here's a fun and mildly related tidbit about gear indicators and the Chrysler LH sedans:Quote »An electronic transaxle gear indicator (PRNDL -- Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, Low) was considered a "must" in the new LH cars and it was in the product plan from the outset. It was to be the first Chrysler product to utilize an electronic PRNDL.
"It was another item that we included, just to please the customer," recalled Gardner. The LH team had budgeted $1 per car for the new PRNDL, but when the engineering research came back, the reality set in. The cost was up to $6.80 per unit. This was unacceptable, obviously, and the team decided to revert to a mechanical PRNDL.
But one young engineer held out for the electronic approach. On his own, he went out and studied all the Japanese and European cars he could find just to determine how they did it.
"As he looked at them," recalled Gardner, "he began to realize what we at Chrysler were doing was putting in new electronics to take a signal from the transmission, process it, and take that signal and transmit it somewhere else to tell the driver the gear position he was in."
The more the engineer thought about it, the clearer it became. "We already had an electronic transmission," said Gardner, "and it tells us when it's in 'DRIVE' and it gives off a signal that says so. So we took the signal that was already there and simply added a PRNDL lamp on the instrument cluster."
The LH Team endorsed the new approach wholeheartedly, and it even cost less than the original $1 per car budgeted, said Gardner.
"It's actually less expensive than a mechanical PRNDL and there's no adjustability needed. The PRNDL read-out is always in the right gear selection mode because the signal comes directly from the transmission."[/quote]I wonder how hard it would be to make the current gear display on, say, the second line of the warning message box?