Development of Automotive Hybrid Meter for Central Information Display

In SAE '88 and '89, we exhibited automotive meters, which we named Hybrid Meter I and Hybrid Meter II both having mechanical pointers as well as segmented LCD and dot matrix LCD respectively. This time, innovative Hybrid Meter III has successfully been prototyped. The meter provides more flexibility in display expression by a full dot matrix color LCD as well as excellent visibility of a mechanical pointer. In this paper, we describe background and objectives of the development, structure of the meter, technical highlights, and possible display modes.