How can it be legal to not have any kind of speed display in front of the driver?

One of the problems with this kind of marketing is that there are essentially no base-models available at dealerships. So the flexibility supposedly provided by making the gauge cluster an option is not actually available to the consumer. This is just a money-grab while advertising a low price.

The ads all show the fully loaded model, "starting from" $LowPrice. We need a rule that the price shown is for the fully loaded model ($HighPrice), maybe fine print "configurable as low as $LowPrice". And then they have to actually allow you to configure that base model, and stock it. Otherwise, it's just effectively false advertising when every dealership gets just one base model that they will not sell to you.

Two notes - 1, this applies only to a pair of base models in the Korean market (for now) and 2, the info is still there, but it's on the central screen and not on the instrument cluster behind the wheel.

You can see it in the article's hero image: https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/2fa717dc-2eea-4e...

The thin screen is not always present, but the larger screen shows the same info upper-left.

- I’m sorry officer I didn’t know I was speeding. My car isn’t equipped with an instrument cluster.

- Oh, I see, go on then.

of course the digitization of more of our lives will take the natural course to unlockable cosmetic items

The old jeeps had the speedometer in the middle of the dash. I don't know how that worked but they were never good on road vehicles anyway (they could do it, just not well) and off road you don't need that. Jeeps in the past 30 or 50 years have moved to cars with an off road image. Still better than most off road, but mostly off road is and after-thought in the design.

If you looked at the new 4runner and land cruiser, it's essentially the same thing but packaged in a higher trim.

At the same time, what do you really need in an instrument cluster besides the fuel, rpm/battery charge and speedometer?

Well now we know that José Muñoz is evil and psychotic.