I'd guess the new cars are probably sold into markets bigger than a single language. (still, that's no excuse not to have an industry group standardising the icons)
The trouble with it is how are you going to look up an icon in a dictionary? People aren't born with the knowledge of what that wretched icon for on/off means. Or that a drawing of an ancient Mesopotamian oil lamp means oil pressure.
I guess these days reverse image search might actually be easier than putting displays in each button/knob, but maybe that will also change back in the near future?
(the car I was just in had ~30 buttons and knobs on the steering wheel and console, not counting stalk functions, and paging through the languages on offer for the lcd displays I counted ~8 distinct script families)
The old-fashioned way to learn the symbols would have been to see them along with their description in the owner's manual, but that also has its drawbacks — I got a good deal on a new truck a few years ago, with the minor hook being that the only dead-tree manual it came with was in czech.
It wouldn't take me too long to learn On/Off in Czech.
I've been in many foreign countries with zero knowledge of the language, and was able to quickly learn the words necessary, like "exit", "airport", etc. Fluency is completely unnecessary.
In your case it's 30 words. I submit it is not any harder to learn them than memorize 30 arbitrary illustrations that have no particular relationship to their function.
And, frankly, most everyone on the planet knows at least a few English words.
Aha, I hadn't understood you meant arbitrary words were fine, just not arbitrary icons.
Maybe sometime when I get sufficiently nerdsniped I'll figure out how to re-silk all the physical labels in my car into the lang belta from The Expanse?
P seteshang
R ruserux
N naterash
D do
(Surely someone, somewhere, has a car with its buttons labelled in tengwar/quenya?)
That oil icon has been the way to indicate low oil pressure since long before I was born in the early 80s. It's newer cars that have started to add text explanations to those warning lights, because dashboards have gotten more flexible with dot matrix and lcd screens.
Perhaps that's the emoji U+1FA94 and is thus standard, and emoji will replace spelling until we end up with a morphographic writing system. Dictionaries will work like mushroom-identification handbooks, where you find the emoji by navigating through a tree of questions.
Walter, if I told you to pull out the magnitude of Saturn before starting and then push it back in after the engine has warmed up, would you know what I'm referring to?
