Huge touchscreen panels are filling up the cabins. It may not be where the future of gauges is decided. In a small workshop in Naples, Florida, an independent BMW mechanic has developed a one-of-a-kind instrument cluster. His BMW E30 digital gauge cluster even makes some of the brand’s official displays look like mere tablets.
Behind the project stands Jean, owner of the Usual Suspects Garage, a shop that specializes in BMW and Porsche work. He couldn’t find any plug-and-play solution that kept the 80s look of the gauges, so he decided to design his own digital dashboard for BMW E28 and BMW E30. The idea was born at the start of the decade, then he revisited it seriously about three years ago. A launch of a version ready to ship is planned for next year, and the waiting list is already growing.
A BMW digital gauge born on a scrap of cardboard
Jean wasn’t a developer by trade. “I didn’t know how to code before”, he told The Drive, the American media outlet. “I started with a screen on a piece of cardboard, but I already had the layout for the E30. I bought another one, then realized it wouldn’t fit in the E30 housing. So I moved it to the E28, which is actually what I had really started with from the get-go.” After a few missteps with suppliers and screens that were hard to come by in 2020, he decided to start over. He kept running his shop in parallel, without letting up.
Very quickly, he stopped simply copying the original cluster. “Then I started thinking, ‘Okay, how can I make this unique?’ I added my little shift light and a trip reset button. I started playing with the code in my spare time. Jean says he just let his brain wander a bit.” The possibilities offered by these displays soon surpassed him—in a good way. Today he’s working on circular displays perfectly fitted to vintage BMW housings, with a fully plug-and-play installation. “I’m trying to account for every variable—the year differences, the harnesses, what’s needed or not,” he explains. His obsession is to polish the interface without losing the original vibe.
Why this BMW digital dash outperforms BMW’s own setups for the E28 and E30
For Jean, a good digital cluster should disappear into the car’s interior. “I don’t want it to feel slow, because then you’re reminded it’s digital,” he says. “I watched a video of, I think, a MoTeC cluster on a Porsche Gunther Werks. I noticed the needle lag a bit, and that surprised me. You see, that’s the kind of thing you tolerate at that price for some components. But obviously you don’t buy the car for the cluster. When you have an extreme car, you don’t buy it for the cluster. But people will buy my cluster for the cluster, right? So I can’t allow that.” As a result, his digital dash hides several HD screens behind the original fascia. It preserves round gauges, analog readability, and it plugs into vintage connectors without cutting a wire.
On the product side, Jean is aiming for a price of about $1,300 per unit, a touch above €1,200. The unit will ship with a rotary control knob, “because nobody really wants to reach behind the wheel to fiddle with a touchscreen,” he notes. He also envisions wireless connectivity for remote updates from a mobile app. The project remains open to Apple CarPlay Ultra, designed for circular displays. A Pro version with built-in navigation is already in the works. The project is funded entirely from personal funds, by Jean and his cousin. He’s considering crowdfunding, but only after the first units are delivered. “Honestly, I don’t want to lose anyone’s trust,” he sums up.
The excitement is already real. “To give you an sense of scale, my Facebook page had 1,000 followers. And in just two weeks it jumped to 40,000,” he adds. He’s already planning a Porsche variant and is also considering some Mercedes models. Proof that a small shop can still disrupt the plans of a major manufacturer, even in the digital arena.
