The San Jose Mercury News has an excellent article on some of the projects under way at Volkswagen's normally hush-hush Silicon Valley skunkworks. The most intriguing is an LCD glass overlay for the instrument cluster, that offers the option of the normal transparent mode or an opaque mode that appears much like a laptop screen, with the option for bitmapped colour graphics. The prototype panel is divided into three sectors, allowing some or none of the analogue dials to remain visible. The report suggests the work will be ready for on-the-road mule testing this year; so could reach production - presumably in Audi A8, Bentley, Lamborghini, or VW Phaeton models to begin with - in 2007. However, while displaying complex information in the instrument panel may be preferable to putting it away down in the centre console, as most cars currently do, the driver still needs to look away from the road - and for longer than the almost instinctive glance that's sufficient to check speed, rpm, temp, etc. Head-up displays, as used in Chevrolet Corvette, are probably a better long-term bet for providing rich data such as pre-emptive information about upcoming junctions.