If you own a 2020 Jeep Wrangler or Gladiator, brace yourself for the inevitable bureaucracy. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has initiated a Preliminary Evaluation into over 230,000 units, 232,209 to be precise, after receiving a flood of owner complaints that their instrument cluster displays are simply failing. It’s not a full-blown recall yet, but with 89 official owner questionnaires documenting partial or complete digital blackouts, federal investigators are officially intrigued.
The issue isn’t merely an inconvenience; it’s a critical safety conundrum. Imagine you’re conquering an ambitious off-road trail, or, more likely, stuck in traffic on the interstate, when your dashboard display decides to take an unscheduled nap. Suddenly, essential, legally mandated data, like your speedometer and, more crucially, the fuel gauge, vanishes. Running out of gas is usually a walk-of-shame moment; in a Jeep on the highway, it becomes a genuine traffic hazard.
The Office of Defects Investigations (ODI) notes that this sudden visual void “may divert the driver’s attention from the driving task, potentially causing a vehicle crash”. Because, naturally, the driver’s first instinct upon losing their gauges is definitely not to panic and crash.
This isn’t Jeep’s first electrical rodeo. Last year, Stellantis had to recall more than 32,000 units of the Wrangler and Gladiator because the smaller 3.5-inch central display within the cluster suffered a similar fate due to a suspected short circuit. It appears the company’s approach to the instrument panel reliability is less “lessons learned” and more “let’s try that electronic gremlin again, but bigger”.
The current investigation, focusing on a much larger population of vehicles, is a terrifying prospect for Stellantis’s finance team. While the NHTSA currently has no reports of accidents, fires, or injuries linked to these faulty instrument clusters, the sheer volume of vehicles under scrutiny makes a large-scale, costly recall a distinct possibility.
Jeep is likely praying for an elegant, low-cost software patch, because the alternative, replacing over 230,000 digital dashboards, would be an epic bill to pay for a display that should just, you know, display things.
