Same. In fact it is significantly better and less distracting than having to glance at the dashboard. Owning a car with a HUD, I definitely miss it in other cars.

I recently hired a car where I had to duck under the steering wheel to check my speed!

Not necessarily disagreeing, but I'm not sure automotive HUD technically qualifies as one.

Airplane HUDs occupy center of the vision, literally showing where you're going. Car HUDs don't, and instead stay out of sight, as it's illegal to do in cars what they do in planes. That makes car HUDs just heads down display that happens to be transparent.

Yep. My new car has a digital rear view mirror. You flip a switch and the rear view mirror becomes a screen showing a feed from a camera on the back of the car. It’s nice for night time as well as when the rear window is blocked by rear seat passengers’ heads, or cargo or whatever.

But it’s uncomfortable for me because it requires my eyes to refocus from distant to close and back when I glance at it, which isn’t needed with an actual mirror. So I don’t use the feature.

Somewhat unrelated, but this discussion made me go from "I don't see what I would need something that tells me tomatoes are tomatoes" (though realtime translation looks very useful), to kinda wanting it only to have a figher plane HUD-like display all the time (to be clear, minus all the fighting parts). Almost useless (at least the attitude and vertical speed part) but would feel kinda cool. Can see some value in having the heading all the time, and speed display to motivate myself to walk faster. (well they have directions which provides much more value than all that).

Though I don't feel comfortable having more Meta in my life.

If you have a nice old-fashioned speedometer you don't need to read it, you can just glance at the angle which will work well for poor focus.

I have one in my car and it's not distracting. It basically displays the current speed, the speed limit, the current cruise control state, the current gear (PRND), and the current navigation instruction (eg. turn left in 1.5 miles).

It doesn't display notifications or other distractions, nor is it possible to configure it to do so.

It's not flickering when viewed in person, but when filmed with a phone camera they do flicker due to how the display works.

It's a pretty good system, and allows one to keep their eyes on the road without having to look at other screens, and keeping ones eyes focused on far objects.

I think the point is that it's much easier to forget you're focusing on the speedometer instead of focusing on the road when the speedometer is physically displayed by a HUD right on the road. Especially if the speedometer keeps changing, since your eyes are naturally attracted to movement in your current field of view.

With a normal car dashboard, you're much more aware you're not seeing the road while checking your speed, and you don't actually see the speedometer moving while you're looking at the road, so it can't accidentally catch your attention.

Of course, none of this will matter in the vast majority of cases. But driving safety is all about the tail end, when you're slightly tired or when someone in front of you does something unexpected and maybe illegal, or someone jumps on the road - these are the times where accidents are avoided, and a HUD might well hurt rather than help for these cases.

My 2025 Corolla has a HUD and it doesn't flicker. it's also fairly minimal and very easy to keep in peripheral vision such that while looking at traffic and such, I can still grasp what it's saying without messing up my attention.

Can't you let your phone know that the USB-C is not connected to headphones?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a windshield projected HUD showing notifications. Let’s hope that never gets added.

Thanks for the tip. I added this to my audio book queue.

It's pretty interesting how today's cars come with features like remote braking and monitoring cameras, all designed to make driving less demanding for us. So as these researchers work to make vehicles less distracting, these cool features somehow end up making us even more distracted. It's an ironic cycle that leaves you more distracted, and maybe more unsafe.