Porsche design at its best is about stripped down design without being overtly minimalist, combined with incredible engineering. Nothing quite says that like this picture.

From the 50s DS all the way through to 1970s CXs, Citroen design was maverick and masterful and their dashboards bucked convention, with single spoke wheels and rotating cylinder speedometers.

The Corvette managed a tour de force, something which was so ostentatious but so competent that it became a classic rather than kitsch. The dashboard, with its semicircular speedometer is a 50s icon.

A dashboard that looks like a dressing table in a vintage 5 star hotel. Pure Mercedes luxury design. This is the design style that is still used for luxury speed boats in Venice, where they even sport Mercedes steering wheels..

Beautifully retored Jetsons era design.

A typical 60s sports car dashboard with drilled steering wheel. Certainly not like a Volvo of the 70s.

Another American icon, a Post War Ford family car before everything went bubble gum. The dashboard looks like it should sit in front of wicker chairs on a veranda. The kind of car the Waltons Family would have driven.

Consider that the Willys Jeep is a form of car design that has lasted for the majority of the history of automobiles.<p /><p />It is a masterful utilitarian WW II design that is the antithesis of what followed in the 50s and has outlasted nearly everything else, without even looking like it was trying.

Launched when digital watches were an expensive rarity, the Lagonda was the first car to have an all LED dashboard. Something which looked incredibly futuristic at the time, and was incredibly expensive.

This is as far removed from a present day dashboard as we could find. An early steam car, where the dials are pressure gauges rather than speedometers. Beautiful, nonetheless.

This design is quintessentially American. Ruthless symmetry and lots of buttons. Baroque and over the top it is nonetheless not quite 50s. a transitional, missing link, design influence wise between Wurlitzer Jukeboxes of the 50s and the Apollo Space Race of the 60s.

Although the Edsel is considered a design failure, in many ways, its interior is a perfect example of non sports car 50s design. It looks like a diner kitchen.

Audi have used designers such as Seymour Powell to continue the design lead that they built up in the 80s with the classic Quattro rally car.<p /><p />No other manufacturer today achieves the same quality of interface design, except perhaps Toyota. The story since the late 90s has been that the larger manufacturers have economies of scale that can actually produce better quality products in terms of specification and tolerances, than small volume super cars which are left to compete on exclusivity and squeezing horse power out of customized engines.

At 70 miles an hour, all you were supposed to hear in a Rolls Royce, was the ticking of the dashboard clock, embedded in a sea of varnished Wallnut.

This is the Yin to the Edsel&#039;s Yang. If the Edsel failed because it subconsciously looked like a mobile kitchen with a giant vagina stuck to the front, the Studebaker is all about the male appendage, with conical protrusions like parts of an aircraft<p /><p />The semicircular horn handle and speedometer which line up to create a full circle without obstructing each other is a particularly nice touch.

The Rover P6 was an unsung design classic. So much so that ripping the superb ergonomic seats out and mounting them on a scaffold frame launched the career of one the world&#039;s most famous furniture designers, Ron Arad.<p /><p />The P6 dashboard came in two versions, and ironically the version on the lower powered 2000 was a better design with iconic linear speedometer.