DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour   

I’m a Hosier by birth and a Michigander by choice which might explain my thinking throughout my life that there have been a lot of worthless devices some of which I never understood. Among them was my Pet Rock, my comic book collection of World War II soldiers on Pacific Islands that were inhabited by dinosaurs and my ex-wife. However, collectively none of them are more unnecessary to so many people than modern vehicles with tachometers.

Oh, sure, there are those stalwarts who actually use an engine’s RPM meter to make accurate shifts. Some would refer to these people as “driving enthusiasts.” Others would simply call them “anal.”

When I was a teenager during the advent of the Muscle Car Era there was nothing cooler than having a big Sun or Stewart-Warner tachometer sitting in the 10 o’clock position of your steering column. In those days there were a lot of drag races. Not for money but for tanks of gas, root beers, what-have-you.

Consequently it behooved all of us to know where our vehicle’s red line was at all phases of a race because there was nothing more expensive or time-consuming as a blown engine. I’m sure most of you have seen film clips of an anti-tank missile working its wonders on the turret of an enemy tank. Well the same thing happens to a 390 cubic inch engine that’s been wound to 7,500 rpm and the redline maxes at 6,300. That my friend is where a tachometer would be invaluable.

However, when is the last time — if ever — that you looked at the tachometer of your vehicle and found it useful? I’ll bet it was when Methuselah entered Junior High. About the only purpose a tachometer serves, say on a Buick, is to balance out the speedometer dial. Surely there are designers out there chomping at the bit to redesign an instrument cluster that doesn’t lose space to the likes of a tachometer dial.

Some of them are so large that Stevie Wonder could tell you how close you’re getting to maxing out. At one time some manufacturers had clocks as big as tach gauges and nobody thought differently about them. Some variation of that could be brought back. Maybe a newly-designed instrument panel could be used as part of a package, like the 2012 Chrysler 300C HEMI Balanced Edition.

Any more, having a tachometer in your car is the personal transportation equivalent of when the railroads had firemen in the cabs of diesel locomotives. They knew their job description there just wasn’t any coal on board nor any place to shovel it.

Say you’re tooling around at 60 mph and your engine is purring along at 2,700 rpm. All of a sudden you go to pass the vehicle ahead of you, your transmission drops down a gear and your engine revs up to 4,000 rpm or higher. What are you going to do develop nervous B.O. and colitis? Look worriedly at your tachometer to see how close to Armageddon your engine is getting? Of course not!

You’re not even going to notice that your engine is revving higher. Why not just remove the tachometer and put in a cylindrical container that would hold pretzel rods or licorice sticks? At least it would have a usable function.

Granted, there are other devices found on vehicles that are probably as useless as a tachometer but I’m loath to think of one. I know that too many people feel the same way about turn signals because it seems they’d rather develop Stage III Crabs than flip a signal lever up or down. Others find dimmer switches for high-beam headlights equally worthless.

Still others try to reduce wear and tear on their own highway lane by using some of yours. I once read a statistic that there are 1.738 more horses’ asses than horses. I’m sure an equal formula can be developed for highway drivers. To these people I say there are two things in their vehicles that are totally worthless: a tachometer and the nut behind the steering wheel. 

Of course my feelings are easily explained by that Indiana/Michigan thing. Duh!