Why Is Europe Generating Highest Demand for Automotive Digital Instrument Clusters?

By Mark Tyson

60 Articles

The surging adoption of automotive digital instrument clusters can be attributed to the burgeoning sales of premium cars across the world. Audi, Lexus, Porsche, Volvo Cars, Land Rover, Infiniti, and Cadillac are some of the most popular luxury car brands in the world. Moreover, the increasing integration of innovative human-machine interface (HMI) solutions in car cabins, owing to the soaring competition among premium car manufacturers, is also boosting the adoption of digital instrument clusters in the automobile industry.

Nowadays, Visteon Corporation, Continental AG, Magneti Marelli S.p.A., Intel Corporation, DENSO Corporation, NVIDIA Corporation, Robert Bosch GmbH, Panasonic Corporation, Delphi Automotive PLC, Nippon Seiki Co. Ltd., and Yazaki Corporation are focusing on product launches and partnerships to offer better digital instrument clusters to automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and aftermarket suppliers. For example, in January 2018, Intel Corporation and Luxoft together developed a solution for a novel automotive reference platform (ARP) and prototyping platform for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and infotainment.

In the coming years, driverless car manufacturers will extensively use the LCD, thin-film transistor LCD (TFT-LCD), and organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display instrument clusters manufactured by the aforementioned companies. With the increasing focus on this futuristic transportation system, fully automatic vehicles will be adopted at a rapid pace. Thus, the advent of autonomous vehicles will accelerate the integration of digital instrument clusters in such vehicles, as they help in handling large volumes of data generated by such automobiles.

Globally, Europe adopted the highest volume of automotive digital instrument cluster in the recent past, due to the vast sales of electric and premium cars in the region. According to the European Federation for Transport and Environment, in 2020, battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) accounted for 5.4% and 5.1% of the passenger car sales in the European Union nations. Volkswagen ID.3, Renault Zoe, and Tesla Model 3 are the most widely sold BEVs, whereas Mercedes A250e, Volvo XC40, and e Volkswagen Passat are the top-selling PHEVs in EU nations.

Whereas, the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is expected to demonstrate the fastest growth in the automotive digital instrument cluster market, in the coming years. This is because the region records the highest electric car sales in the region. Large-scale adoption of such cars can be credited to the favorable government policies supporting the production and sales of EVs in the region. Additionally, the burgeoning adoption of premium cars, primarily on account of the rising disposable income, in APAC will also escalate the need for digital instrument clusters in the foreseeable future.

Thus, the growing adoption of premium cars and ongoing development in autonomous technology will augment the need for digital instrument clusters in the automotive sector in the coming years.