Tesla filed a petition with U.S. automotive safety regulators saying 612,000 vehicles produced since 2012 do not fully meet federal safety standards because screens can be changed from miles per hour to metric measurements only, according to published documents Friday.
However, the carmaker asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to declare that the non-compliance issue is not relevant to safety, according to the agency’s statement.
Tesla said it corrected the production problem in September and that more than 75 percent of the affected vehicles in the United States accepted the firmware update released in September.
Tesla said that if vehicles are only shown at miles, all speed limit-related features, such as the Traffic Aware cruise control and the speed wizard, will convert the mapped data from mph to km / h, which which will cause the vehicle speed to automatically match the appropriate speed limit. ”
Tesla added that vehicle operators can change the screen to miles per hour, saying the option “is easily found on the screen menu and is not buried in the submenus.”
Tesla said it did not receive any reports of accidents related to this issue and noted that NHTSA granted two petitions for trivial treatment that included failure to display the speedometer on Volkswagen AG in July and BMW in 2015.