The Dash

I used to not pay much attention to the interior of cars. As long as it was functional, then it was fine with me. Now that my daily commute keeps me in the car two hours a day, I have began to appreciate the attention to detail found in cars. In my wandering through car websites I began to notice how cool looking the dashboards in some care are, and how terrible they are in others. The dashboard seems to be one factor that illustrates the lack of detail and quality that was found in 90's American cars. The switch from wood, metal, and leather to cheap plastic and rubber. Nice toggle switches and dials, gave way to plastic sliders, the knobs of which feel like they are designed to fall off at the gentlest touch. European manufacturers seemed to keep up the quality in the dash department, and I especially enjoy their first forays into high tech instrumentation. It has a great future-retro feel, like watching 70's and 80's sci-fi. I also noticed that now only exotic cars seem to have interesting or innovative dashboards, this combined with how homogeneous modern dashboards seem to be is quite disappointing.