"Take care 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?."
Typo corrected. I'm not saying you should let the users go in the red without knowing. But does it have to be a big dial that takes a 1/3 of the dashboard?
Assuming the author meant car, this would be very dangerous (i.e. irreversible engine damage): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redline