Tag Archives: Dashboard

News

Bugatti’s Tourbillon Dashboard Isn’t a Screen—It’s a $4-Million Swiss Watch

In 2026, every hypercar seems to be in a race to out-Tesla Tesla. Bigger screens. More pixels. More glowing rectangles screaming for your attention while 1800 horsepower tries to kill you. Bugatti didn’t just opt out of that race—it burned the rulebook.

The new Bugatti Tourbillon doesn’t greet its driver with software. It greets them with metal, jewels, gears, and hand-finished Swiss obsession. Sitting behind the fixed-hub steering wheel is what might be the most insane dashboard ever bolted into a road car: an entirely mechanical, analog instrument cluster with more than 650 individual parts, built by Concepto, a Swiss manufacturer better known for haute-horlogerie than hypercars.

This isn’t retro cosplay. This is something far more extreme.

Why Bugatti Named a Car After a Watch

Tourbillon is a word that carries weight in Switzerland. Invented in 1801, the tourbillon is a rotating cage inside a mechanical watch designed to cancel out gravity’s effect on timekeeping. It’s considered the peak of traditional watchmaking—a technical flex so complex that its real purpose today is simply to prove you can build it.

Bugatti took that philosophy and turned it into a car.

Instead of naming this hypercar after a legendary driver, Bugatti named it after a mechanism that exists purely to chase perfection. That decision set the tone for everything—including the gauges.

Bugatti didn’t want screens that would feel outdated in ten years. They wanted something that could sit on a Concours lawn in 2126 and still look right.

So they built a mechanical dashboard the same way Swiss watchmakers build six-figure wristwatches.

This Is Not a Display. It’s a Machine.

The Tourbillon’s instrument cluster isn’t “analog-style.” It’s actually analog—gears, bearings, shafts, and springs moving real needles across real dials. Concepto had to invent new tools just to make it, because watchmaking equipment is designed for objects measured in millimeters, not car dashboards.

And Bugatti didn’t relax the standards just because everything got bigger.

The cluster uses:

  • Functional rubies as bearing jewels (yes, like in a watch)
  • Sapphire crystal instead of plastic
  • Skeletonized metal structures
  • Hand-finished needles
  • Engine-turned and guilloché dial faces
  • Custom-cut gears made only for this car

Every single visible surface is finished the way it would be in a Swiss grand complication.

This isn’t decoration. It’s engineering with vanity—and that’s exactly why it works.

A Car Within the Car

The Tourbillon cluster is so complex that Bugatti treats it like its own vehicle subsystem. It has its own “heart,” its own mechanisms, its own electronics, and its own assembly process that blends LEDs and PCBs into something that still feels like it belongs in a 19th-century watchmaker’s workshop.

And then there’s customization.

Owners can specify:

  • Clous de Paris
  • Radial guilloché
  • Tapestry patterns
  • Engine-turned textures
  • Aventurine stone
  • Even diamond-set elements

And Bugatti doesn’t show you a rendering. They hand you physical samples, like you’re choosing the dial for a Patek Philippe.

That’s the level we’re talking about.

The Fixed-Hub Wheel Makes It Even Better

Bugatti didn’t just make this masterpiece and then hide it behind a steering wheel. The Tourbillon uses a fixed-hub wheel, meaning the center doesn’t rotate. The rim spins around the cluster, keeping the gauges perfectly visible at all times.

So no matter how much lock you apply, that mechanical artwork stays centered in your view—like a watch face strapped to the car itself.

It’s one of the few moments in modern hypercar design where engineering, ergonomics, and theatre all align.

This Is Bugatti’s Real Flex

Anyone can slap a screen into a car. That’s easy. That’s what everyone does.

But building a dashboard that uses rubies, sapphire, skeletonized metal, and 650 mechanical parts, just so it will look beautiful in a century? That’s not about usability.

That’s about legacy.

Bugatti isn’t just building the fastest thing on the road. It’s building something that collectors will treat like a Fabergé egg on wheels—a machine that refuses to become obsolete.

The Tourbillon’s instrument cluster isn’t a feature.
It’s a statement.

And it might be the most Bugatti thing Bugatti has ever done.

Source: Bugatti

News

How BMW’s Designworks Shapes the Modern Dashboard

In 2025, the fiercest automotive battles aren’t happening under the hood—they’re happening on the dashboard. As cars evolve into rolling smart devices, the interface in front of the driver has become every bit as important as the engine beneath them. And at BMW’s Designworks studio, that digital battleground is where the future of the brand is being drawn, tapped, and swiped into existence.

The Quiet Power of Interface Design

Car design used to be defined by sheet metal and stance. Now, the first impression often comes from a boot-up animation rather than a sculpted fender. More than ever, a clunky interface can sink an otherwise excellent car.

Matthew Potter, Director of Interaction Design at Designworks, has watched this shift unfold from the inside. He recalls the early days of iDrive—the system that debuted with the 2001 BMW 7 Series—as a turning point.

“Things were a lot simpler back then,” he says. Early screens were basically big buttons in digital form. One dial, one menu, one mission: deliver the ultimate sense of simplicity.

Fast-forward two decades and simplicity is a much more complicated target.

Global Drivers, Global Differences

Potter and his team now wrestle with questions that sound more like tech-market research than car design.

What apps dominate in Germany?
What features do Americans expect to see instantly?
How do Chinese users organize information?

Across markets, the answers diverge dramatically.

“People in the United States really want convenience,” Potter says. “They want more visual, more simplicity. They want more playfulness.” German users? They tend to appreciate dense data, more reading, more structure—digital efficiency over digital delight.

And that’s only part of the equation. Even within a single country, tastes split. Drivers in Texas approach technology differently than those in California. Multiply that by the global footprint of BMW, and it becomes clear why Designworks operates studios in Munich, Shanghai, and Los Angeles.

Adrian van Hooydonk, BMW Group’s design chief, puts it bluntly: “The studios have two tasks.” One is to detect global trends that will matter to all BMW customers. The other is to understand what’s uniquely important locally.

Finding Balance in the Chaos

If there’s a single theme behind modern BMW UI design, it’s balance. Balance between emotion and usability. Between playfulness and precision. Between global coherence and regional flavor.

“You can make a really cool interface,” Potter says. “But if you can’t use it, it’s kind of useless.”

So every element of BMW’s digital cockpit—the icons, the menus, the layout—is shaped by this push and pull. Interior screens may stretch wider than ever, but every pixel is debated, tested, and tuned.

What’s striking is that despite all the input from global markets, BMW’s design DNA still holds firm. Van Hooydonk notes that even when international preferences diverge, nothing ever emerges “counterintuitive to what our brands stand for.”

Instead, the variety of perspectives sharpens the end product.

“We take these things on board from what we learn from China or US customers,” he says, “and they all make our products better.”

The Dashboard as Identity

Whether you’re admiring a new BMW from the lot or watching the startup sequence from the driver’s seat, what you see is more than just software. It’s the visible result of a worldwide design conversation—one that stretches across cultures and continents.

And in the era of the connected car, that conversation is becoming the defining part of the brand.

The future of driving, it turns out, might not be written in horsepower figures or wind-tunnel numbers. It might be written on the screen.

Source: BMW