Gone are the days when our gauge clusters were filled with gauges of this and gauges of that to tell you every little thing going on with the engine.

Just looking at the clusters of my old AW11 MR2 & FC RX7 I got the basic gist of what was going on underneath the hood.

(Pictured: Gauge clusters of cars from the 80’s that tell me more than most modern cars)

But, I’ve since moved onto newer cars, the most recent of which is the Evo X.
Now don’t get me wrong I think the car is great, it does everything that I need it to do.
However, I have no idea what’s going on with my engine, and I’ll probably never know until it’s a little too late.

Nowadays in order to keep up with the times and the styling of the times a lot of the gauges we used to have have been thrown out the window by the manufacturers; and instead we now have simplicity, we have more aesthetically pleasing “gauges” that require little to no effort to decipher. Blue means cold, red means hot, no bars and that blinking light that looks like a gas pump means go get gas now, and full bars means you have a full tank.

(Pictured: Go Get Gas Now)

That’s all great and such, until you start maintaining and modifying your own car; subsequently walking that thin line of paranoia.
And everyone who does work on their own car, knows that paranoia of driving down the street, suddenly hearing a clunk and wondering “Did my _________ just fall off/break?!”; or wondering if that smell of burning motor oil is coming from your car because you didn’t do your oil change properly and you have no way of knowing since you don’t have an oil pressure gauge, or maybe it’s just that old clunker puttering down the road in front of you.

For the former I can’t help you out, but for the latter there is a solution.
Defi Gauges, made to monitor all sorts of things that go on underneath your hood.

Now I know gauges have been covered many times, but maybe, just like me, you don’t want your entire dash and A-pillar bombarded with gauges.
So, I present to you the Advance ZD.
The ZD is a multi-gauge, in a small OLED display it can tell you a whole lot about your car without taking up a whole lot of space.

I recently installed it into my Evo X because I wanted to know the Oil Pressure & Temperature and a precise Water Temperature without the clutter.

(Pictured: No clutter)

You’ll notice that the majority of my Tach is covered by a Boost Gauge (installed because the one thing that the ZD cannot display is boost), but not to worry because the ZD also has a Tach option and there’s a Sequential Indicator consisting of 8 LEDs along the top of the display that are synced with the engine rpm and now one LED lights up every 500RPM I go passed 3000RPM.

The only part of installing the ZD that I dreaded was the tearing apart of my dash to route the wires.

(Pictured: A new car owner’s nightmare)

For those that want to add other things to monitor such as Exhaust Temperature and Fuel Pressure, they too can be monitored on the ZD.

If you want to save some money look into the ADVANCE ZD SPORT PACKAGE. That will get you started in the right direction.

So far the ZD has given me great peace of mind.
Now when I pull up to a stop and smell burning motor oil I can look at the ZD and see that I’m not losing oil pressure, then I can look over and think to myself that the owner of that old clunker needs to fix those oil leaks.