Car dashboards are named after boards that stopped mud splashing carriage drivers
Drive a gig through a puddle and the horse's hooves fling muck straight at you. Carriage builders fitted a splash-board to stop it, a term recorded from 1826, and Americans soon called it a dash-board. Cars inherited the panel, then the name, long after flying mud stopped being its job.
Early horseless carriages kept their board simply to deflect debris from the front wheels, since the engine sat beneath the driver. When Émile Levassor moved the engine to the front in the early 1890s, the panel became a shield against heat and oil, and its position made it a handy spot for gauges and switches. The Oldsmobile Curved Dash, the first mass-produced car, took its name from a board curved like a sleigh's.
Safety thinking arrived slowly. Chrysler's 1937 lineup, including Dodge, DeSoto and Plymouth, offered a flat dash raised above the knees with flush controls. Claire L. Straith pushed for padding in the 1930s, the Tucker 48 finally had it in 1948, and padded panels spread widely during the 1970s. Airbags joined steering wheels and dashboards as standard kit in the early and mid-1990s. Meanwhile, American stylists of the 1940s to the 1960s loved chrome, even though sunlight glinting off it could dazzle drivers of convertibles.
Digital readouts first appeared in a production car with the 1976 Aston Martin Lagonda, followed by the 1978 Cadillac Seville, and in 1983 the Renault 11 Electronic became Europe's first hatchback with one. Reviewers disliked them: hard to read in bright sun, costly to repair, and lacking the smooth sweep of a needle, since the numbers jump in whole steps. Most makers retreated to analog gauges during the 1990s, though Renault and Citroën persisted.
Screens came back in force from the mid-2010s. Fully configurable clusters now let drivers choose where navigation, phone details or a blind-spot camera view appear, and manufacturers can reuse the same hardware across several models. Most family cars show warning lights rather than oil-pressure gauges, while sports cars and heavy trucks often keep real dials.
Source: Dashboard
