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Back in the 80s one of my father's summer past times was test driving cars. Once a week or so he would stick me on his lap in our Dodge Horizon and have me work the wheel while he took care of the pedals and gear shift with a Camel in one hand and a bottle of beer (generic) in the other, Uriah Heap or Deep Purple on the 8-track since for what ever reason those were the only cartridges that 8-track would not eat. Remember taking a car with a setup much like the Inca's for a test drive (I was never on his lap for the test drive but the Camel and beer (generic) were often still with him), no idea what model it was just remember that it had a yoke loaded with controls instead of a wheel and a dash filled with LCDs. Unexpected bit of nostalgia.
I don't think NHTSA ever approved a yoke steering setup for a production car in the US; but a late-80's Pontiac Bonneville or Mitsubishi Galant would have steering wheels chock full of control buttons, and a dash covered in LEDs like the cockpit of a Gundam.
Steering wheel is wild But those kind of dashboard gauges did make it to production. 80s digital dashes from GM were actually super cool. They have a few failure points but there are still some guys restoring them . I retrofitted the S10 model into an S10 blazer in high school and owned a factor Camaro with one. The S10 one was like driving a space ship at the time. Here’s some cool examples

https://drivemag.com/red-calipers/the-definitive-collection-...

I'm not even sure I would call that a steering wheel, it's more of a yoke (like the ones used in planes). It was kind of ahead of its time, because more and more controls have moved to the steering wheel in recent decades, but if this appeared in a real car I would be afraid of accidentally pressing a button when I just want to turn the wheel. Also, I'm not a pilot but I think an airplane yoke is optimized for small but precise inputs, if you have to turn it around 180° or even 90° (like you often have to do with a steering wheel) you are probably doing something wrong - that's why having "handles" just in the places where your hands normally are makes sense for a plane, but not as much for a car.
The 1990 to 1993 Pontiac Grand Prix in SE and GTP trim has a steering wheel I love, because it and the steering column are adorned with buttons you can press without moving your hands. On either side of the gauges are even more buttons, making it look like some sort of arcade flight sim cockpit. The final generation Mazda Cosmo also did it, but in a more elegant way where the only giveaway that they were buttons and not trim pieces was the non colour matched black plastic of the bumper controls for the cruise functions on the right side of the wheel.
Looking back on some of those after not seeing them for 20 years is refreshing. Some of those are so bad, but a few of them are pretty cool. The 727/Space Shuttle styled, green cathode touchscreens are amazing though!
Oldsmobile has some really terrific engineers. I know because I attended schools in the Lansing area with their kids. What killed the brand was a series of general managers in the late nineties and early two thousands. Until then Oldsmobile outsold Pontiac and Buick.
This is basically the story of GM for the last 40-50 years as a whole. The engineers will do or propose something brilliant and really great, and then management repeatedly snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. Saturn was another extremely good example of GM building something excellent and then their management just completely drove it off a cliff. The S-series was a really great design when it came out, and was honestly far better than it's internal competitors (like the Cavalier) and was competitive with small Japanese cars; the space frame, plastic panels, lost foam casting for the block, etc were really good engineering, and the car and brand had a deserved cult following. GM didn't like the fact it made the Cavalier look like shit and so naturally it was allowed to wither on the wine and then basically everything else after was just more badge engineered Chevy and Pontiac vehicles. GM's entire management should have been totally shitcanned at multiple points during and after the early 90s for the absolutely abhorrent job they did.
What about the managers killed the brand?
Cybertruck vibes on how much of a takeoff this was. Engineers who get ideas like this sold to the upper management always have my props (as long as they don't compromise the product too much that is)

EDIT: jumped the gun on this one and confused some memories. This was just a prototype, with obviously different requirements for "selling" the idea but there were some actual production cars with ahead-of-their-time graphical terminals like https://youtu.be/Lkaazk68iGE?si=_qpkZaVobI6zK-Cs&t=305

A touchscreen to change the temperature?! I'm glad that never caught on!
I suspect designers rather than engineers. General Motors has always been the bigger fins are better company.
I love this!!!

As a non-American, let me say never has a brand name been so out of sync with a car design. That thing is anything but an "Old"-smobile.

Looking at it I also thought how cool it would be if the dash were entirely modular a-la Framework laptops. "Standard" electrical, electronic and mechanical interfaces to which modders could fit all sorts of weird and wonderful interfaces. And I mean the whole physical dash as well. I know it'll never happen, but somewhere in a parallel universe...

> That thing is anything but an "Old"-smobile.

At one point, they had an advertising line, "This is not your father's Oldsmobile".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNewkCV7-pc

> As a non-American, let me say never has a brand name been so out of sync with a car design. That thing is anything but an "Old"-smobile.

It was named after the founder, Ransom Olds. I get it, though.

From 1975-1985, they were selling 500,000 Oldsmobile Cutlasses per year. Insane.
If you like this sort of stuff this BERTONE video always inspires me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynDCCXNg0Cc

Wonder if there are any css/ui kits for this sort of analog retro style?

Bertone definitely had a "look". Cyber Truck looks now like an extension (almost parody?) of the Bertone design.
Bertone seems to still be offering cars https://bertone.it/

price point is a little higher than the cybertruck, but hey, probably worth it.

Whoa, with this amount of 7 segment LED displays, it's a total mid-80s car UI dream! It definitely has its major flaws, but that's also common for mid-80s digital car UIs.

The exterior looks like the love child of 70s wedge design and 90s rounded corners.

"The dash display is almost completely digital—strangely, they left an extra analog speedometer and tachometer"

This is common even today, even on 100% digital screen dashboards, they'll have fake analog speedometer and tachometer displays. My 2023 Mazda CX5 is 50/50, half the dashboard is analog and half is digital. And I like it that way.

I’m never a fan of digital speedometers. I still have to think about how far a number is from my target. I’m sure if I used them long enough instead of only seeing them in rentals I’d get used to it.

I do like a digital cruise set speed.

One of my first cars was a 1986 Oldsmobile Riviera

The Riviera was one of my favorite cars, had a touch screen to control most things in the car. Basically the Tesla of 1986.

https://www.carscoops.com/2021/10/the-buick-riviera-had-a-to...

For a while I kinda wanted to buy a used Buick Reatta as a project car because it had the same CRT touchscreen technology. It's extremely cool if you're into the 80s retro futuristic vibe.
The Subaru XT Turbo was a nearly as weird futuristic car that they actually made. I had one and it was fun… a great little sports car with a futuristic design, that with the touch of a button lifted high in the air and was also great offroad- with real center diff lock 4WD.
Similarly, the Citroen GSA actually existed: https://www.autoevolution.com/cars/citroen-gsa-1979.html#aga...
Incas is a weird name. I can't see it other as the plural of Inca, as in that historic people of South America. If such a name is used for a product, it's always singular if the product is singular: e.g. Jeep Cherokee, not Cherokees. A box of chocolates shaped like aboriginal characters could plausibly be Cherokees (issues of offensiveness aside).
When I see this, it always fascinates me how cars are one of the things that remain consistently boring -- there's so much room for different enhancements, styles of steering wheel, and so on ; and yet the most we've been able to do is stuff a computer in the dash (yes, I understand autonomous cars are a thing too, but I'm focusing on cars we drive).
I'm no car guy at all, but even I can see the faults with the doors (driver gets wet when the passenger jumps in while it's raining), and with the steering wheel (imagine trying to do a hand-over hand turn without accidentally pressing one of the buttons!)

More car makers are better, and engineers should be allowed to have a bit of fun, but concept cars are almost laughable sometimes in their basic flaws.

Maybe they wanted to "solve" the hand-over-hand turning problem with insanely quick-ratio steering
Somehow still looks like the future.
The steering reminds me of Mercury's "wrist twist" steering concept from the 60s https://youtu.be/PWWYkxQCFfQ?si=i_Gh4gtXjJv5Pn51&t=52
That's looks pretty neat. Right up until power steering fails, then it becomes kind of a problem.
If you remember the average age of Oldsmobile customers (and remember Oldsmobile) you know this would never have sold well, even if they had switched to a more conventional interior. This is something Pontiac might have tried, though.
US auto manufacturers could coast for 50 years on reissuing the classics upgraded for fuel efficiency and crash safety. Instead we get soulless, gaudy, plastic bullshit that falls apart the moment the warranty expires.
It's a terrible steering wheel, but has possibilities as a game controller.
Great taste but bad execution. It makes a ton of sense IMO to put all the controls on the steering wheel so that the driver never has to take their hand off of it to do something. Physical buttons like this are also great UI for critical controls (unlike touch screen). My only gripe is the layout they went with. Its very disorganized.

For things which are symmetrical within the car (door lock/unlock, windows up/down, turn signal) they should be symmetrical on the wheel as well. Critical elements to driving like the windshield wipers, defrosters, horn and turn signals should all be extremely self evident at a glance whereas amenity controls like radio and AC should be off to the side.

The body styling is more 1990s than 1980s, also. To my eyes, say, a 1999 Acura Integra looks more dated than this thing. :)
There was an Isuzu vehicle in the late 80s early 90s (Impulse?) that had a similar button pad design within finger reach off the steering wheel.
Honestly wish there was more experimentation in automotive human-UX besides the current "Just put it all in touchscreen LOL" design rut we're in. A car today functions almost entirely like every car that's existed since the 1950s: Big, transparent window in front, a handful of "critical" gauges and displays underneath that window, a steering wheel that hasn't changed in a century (besides the addition of buttons), accessory devices/entertainment in a center stack on a central console, a glove box or some other storage in the passenger side. Any time a manufacturer deviates from the norm, even slightly, the result gets derided as weird and ugly, and we revert back to the 1950s. Have we really settled on objectively optimal controls?
No distracting touchscreen. Only controls you learn with muscle memory after a few days. Brilliant.
It makes me want to play RoadBlasters (this is the highest of praise)
I miss my quad 4. Those things were a blast to drive.

I like how the flip-top cockpit in this concept compliments the fancy joysticks and display to give the impression you're driving a luxury fighter jet.

Example of bad UX: controls where your hands already are is great (curse you, idiotic touchscreens) but gear controls for an automatic transmission aren’t used while in motion, so put them elsewhere.

Forgivable, as it’s a concept car, so just give people an idea.

Really wish Oldsmobile were still around
But are they in early this year?
Ah yes, back when the future was still bright.

But now we have so many shades of corp grey.

So we've got that going for us...

This headline would be much less effective if it told you the truth, that the car never existed:

“Unfortunately for us, Oldsmobile never went ahead and produced the Incas. They made a slew of other wild concept cars as well, but none of those saw the light of day either […]”