Paul Cothenet thinks most dashboards are shit and you probably don’t need one (on-screen dashboards, you probably need a physical car dashboard):

Side note: I’m talking trash about software here, but the law could be extended to all dashboards.

Take car dashboards for example. They use vast amount of real estate to display information that is useless 99% of the time. How often do you need to know the RPM on an automatic car? Can’t you just take that stupid dial out and put something useful instead?.
They also employ UX techniques that dates from a time where the only UI component you can use was a light bulb. If that red thing is critical, can’t you tell me right away what it means?
I have knack for sniffing out good design links that reference cars or car metaphors.