Tehy titled the article wrong. Should be:
"Ford to create busy e-bike for commuters".
Based on the picture they give:
I think the designers are thinking of large-aircraft pilots, who generally don't need to use most of the instruments below and out of sight, cuz the plane does most of the work for them most of the time. When they do use those "busy" instruments, they are often not in any kind of "traffic" situation that requires their attention outside the cockpit. When situations *do* arise that require both, it sometimes leads to crashes or mid-air collisions, when they don't do it "right" and have one pilot watching outside and one monitoring instruments.
On a bike there is only one "pilot" and attention takes significant time to shift from a display down low to back up high / forward.
People are people, and often are easily distracted.
Bicycles dont' really "need" a dashboard...but if they do have one it needs to be in the normal field-of-view so that no complete attention-shift is needed to get information from it.
And it needs to be simple, instantly viewable and understandable, with guages for one thing not looking anything like another, so things can't be confused with each other (a common problem with multi-instrument displays).
That display has a whole lot of information on it, whcih the rider will have to sort and concentrate on to interpret to find the info they want, if it isn't just speed or whatever the other gauge is (cant' tell what unit it says, print is too small).
I expect they would not be using an actual tablet for the display once it's production, because then it could not be used as an actual commuter in a lot of places. Rain would be bad, as would direct sun/heat in places like Phoenix, especially in summer (where I've seen LCDs *in the shade* permanently blackened, let alone LCDs or OLEDs in the direct noonday sun). Then there's the inevitable crashes or falls, which would have a good chance of smashing the screen.
I appreciate their effort to "change" things to make it a better "experience" for a commuter...but I don't imagine their present state of things is as helpful as they think. Anyone already commuting may not need that info, and anyone new to riding/commuting needs stuff they can't (shouldn't) be looking at while riding, and will probably need to stop to safely interpret the display, for things like maps, performance data, etc. Otherwise they're probably going to end up with an increase in bicycle-involved accidents of various types, from the very minor to fatal.
Hopefully they're loooking into that sort of thing,too....but somehow I doubt it. Too many engineers and marketers are looking at how pretty they can make things, how many gadgets they can cram in, and not how safely useable something is. :/
