Many, many people have studied, in great depth, how human beings acquire and process visual data. It's been proven, time and time again, that the fastest way to acquire and process key visual information is to present it in a non-numerical form. Doesn't matter too much whether this is round dials, linear bar graph type displays, or some other way of being able to show something as a very simple image, although in tests round indicators usually come out best. Anything that avoids the need for a different data processing pathway, one that involves interpretation of numbers or letters for example, which is a great deal slower to process, is a good thing.
Tests with different ways of presenting information to people always, without fail, prove that people can interpret data very much faster if it's presented graphically, rather than numerically. Part of this is because much of the time there's no need to read some information to a high degree of accuracy, something like reading the time, or reading speed from a speedometer, just involves determining the relative position of a hand, needle or bar. With a speed display we only need to resolve it to about 10 mph, for example, just seeing a marker is higher or lower than the position where we know it should be for a desired speed is usually enough.
This key understanding of how we acquire and process visual information led to the unusual (to anyone not used to aircraft) arrangement where a lot of the older dial-type instruments were oriented so that the normal reading was with the needle pointing upwards. An extremely rapid (fraction of a second) scan across a panel almost instantly shows an anomaly, without the pilot actually reading the data from any of the instruments.
There's not a lot wrong with the principle of having a minimalist car cockpit, like that in the Model 3, if it's designed well, taking account of several decades of hard-won knowledge about the way human beings best acquire and process visual information. The central screen position isn't ideal, but if it presented data in a way that reduced the time the driver has to spend looking at it, rather than the road, it would be a great deal easier to use, and almost certainly safer.