Sporting a glass cockpit with programmable touch screens, the Ford Edge offers space-age theatricality to the driving experience. But it may face some stiff internal competition when the Explorer is relaunched.

As CEO of Ford since 2006, aeronautical engineer Alan Mulally has adapted some airplane design ideas for automobiles. One of his first was standardizing the placement of controls on all Ford vehicles. You can find the windshield wiper switch in the same place on the Fiesta and the Taurus.

Relocating controls is child's play compared to Mulally's latest airborne adaption: Adapting the glass cockpit for drivers of vehicles like the 2011 Edge.

In an airplane's glass cockpit, as many as seven programmable computer screens replace dozens of mechanical gauges to display fight information for pilots as needed. The Boeing (BA) 777, which Mulally was the chief engineer on, is often described as the first airplane with a fully glass cockpit.

Both in theory and in practice, the glass cockpit makes a lot of sense. German luxury carmakers have struggled to reduce instrument complexity, resorting to combining controls for individual functions into a single knob that must be tilted and twirled in a complicated series of movements that defy intuition. More