Tesla has filed a petition with U.S. car safety regulators, saying 612,000 vehicles produced in 2012 do not fully meet federal safety standards because displays can be changed from miles per hour to metric measurements only, documents published on Friday.
However, the carmaker asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to declare that the non-compliance issue has no safety consequences, according to the agency document.
Tesla said it corrected the issue in production in September and that more than 75% of affected American vehicles accepted the firmware update released in September.
Tesla said that if vehicles are set to show only kilometers, all speed limit functions, such as Automatic Speed Control and Speed Assist, will “convert mapped data from mph to km / h, resulting in the vehicle speed automatically corresponding to the corresponding speed limit. ”
Tesla added that vehicle operators can change the display back to miles per hour, saying the option is “easy to locate in the display menu and not buried in submenus”.
Tesla said it had not received any accident reports related to the issue and noted that NHTSA had granted two petitions for a treatment without consequences involving non-compliance with the speedometer display to Volkswagen AG in July and BMW in 2015.