Canadian spec car switched to US gauge cluster, reading off

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May 7, 2020
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Location
Ames, IA
Before I go to the dealer and request some service, I am curious if anyone else has bought a car that was originally from Canada, and was imported and sold in the US, and is having issues with the speedometer.

I bought a 2019 Nissan Rouge, last Friday, that was originally sold in Toronto. It only has 16k miles, and was imported to the US last January. Car Fax shows the first dealer that had it did the gauge cluster swap. I bought it from the 2nd dealer who took possession of it. It pretty much sat in the garage all weekend until I started driving it yesterday.

When setting the cruise, it tells me I’ve set the speed 3-5mph more than what the gauge is reading. So, the computer thinks the car is going faster than the speedometer says it is. I have verified with a Garmin GPS, and also checked on the highway using mile markers and the trip odometer. The trip odometer changes to .9 just before I reach the 1 mile mark on 3 different tries.

Is this something I have to live with being it was built for km/h measurement, or should I push the dealer to recalibrate it? In this market, car dealers are not very customer service oriented, so I want my ducks in a row before I go in.

Thanks.
 
Don't most cars have a digital speedo that can go between mph and km/h? :unsure:

And the ones that don't usually have small numbers in the other scale.

Speedometer error is common on many cars.
 
By law speedometers cannot read lower than actual speed. It's not uncommon for automakers to set their speedo to read a little higher than actual speed. Perhaps during the conversion the speedo error was set in the wrong direction?
 
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For cars that don't support changing to the speedometer between km/h and mph with a user setting, the conversion is often done by putting a third-party mph dial scale over the existing Canadian cluster rather than spending hundreds on the official part. Results will vary.
 
For cars that don't support changing to the speedometer between km/h and mph with a user setting, the conversion is often done by putting a third-party mph dial scale over the existing Canadian cluster rather than spending hundreds on the official part.
Why, most cars have both mph and kph on the speedo.

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A US buyer would want the big numbers to be mph-- on a Canadian market car the big numbers will be km/h with mph on the small secondary scale.

Post a picture of the 2019 Nissan Rogue if you want to argue about it. I'm not that interested to look it up.
 
A US buyer would want the big numbers to be mph-- on a Canadian market car the big numbers will be km/h with mph on the small secondary scale.

Post a picture of the 2019 Nissan Rogue if you want to argue about it. I'm not that interested to look it up.
I'm sure if you're buying from Canada you're getting a good enough deal so you can live with it. Heck, I have some grey market cars marked ONLY in kph.
 
Before I go to the dealer and request some service, I am curious if anyone else has bought a car that was originally from Canada, and was imported and sold in the US, and is having issues with the speedometer.

I bought a 2019 Nissan Rouge, last Friday, that was originally sold in Toronto. It only has 16k miles, and was imported to the US last January. Car Fax shows the first dealer that had it did the gauge cluster swap. I bought it from the 2nd dealer who took possession of it. It pretty much sat in the garage all weekend until I started driving it yesterday.

When setting the cruise, it tells me I’ve set the speed 3-5mph more than what the gauge is reading. So, the computer thinks the car is going faster than the speedometer says it is. I have verified with a Garmin GPS, and also checked on the highway using mile markers and the trip odometer. The trip odometer changes to .9 just before I reach the 1 mile mark on 3 different tries.

Is this something I have to live with being it was built for km/h measurement, or should I push the dealer to recalibrate it? In this market, car dealers are not very customer service oriented, so I want my ducks in a row before I go in.

Thanks.
So is it the difference between digital display and a gauge?
 
Is there a warranty? So if you set the cruise control to 55mph, the speedo is showing ~52mph?
 
My biggest concern if the cluster has been changed is whether the mileage on the odometer is accurate or not. Years ago I had a speedometer go bad. It was replaced under warranty with a new cluster but the new speedometer was set at 000000.0 miles when installed instead of the 014XXX.X miles on the original odometer. I was told by the dealer they couldn't set the mileage to the original mileage on the old odometer because of odometer tampering laws.
 
My biggest concern if the cluster has been changed is whether the mileage on the odometer is accurate or not.
These days the mileage is usually stored in the BCM so changing the cluster would have no effect. If it is stored in the cluster, it would have to match the vin in the BCM to work and used clusters can't be swapped.
 
To answer a few of the questions:

I’m expecting the dealer that sold it to me to “make it right” since it’s only been a few days I have have put less then 50 miles on the car. No warrently would or should cover this. They sold a car with an inaccurate speedometer, though I suspect they did not know that.

I’d much rather have the original gauge cluster with km/h and user the small numbers than a new gauge that is incorrect. The HVAC is in C and cannot be changed, but 20 C is 70 F, so it isn’t hard to keep that in line.

When I set the cruise at 65 mph, the speedo says 65, but the digital readout on the screen says it is set at 71 mph. I set the cruise at 35 mph and it was saying 38 mph as the set speed on the digital screen. I’d take a picture, but that would be unsafe….

Tires are the originals, unless the dealer started swapping wheels between cars. The size matches on the tire and the car’s decal.

I’m happy to live with it and use my Garmin as the actual speedo, but my wife will occasionally drive this and will not keep it in mind, meaning it will cost me a speeding ticket or two…..
 
These days the mileage is usually stored in the BCM so changing the cluster would have no effect.
+1. Currently trying to work out a 2014 CRV from MPH to KPH, which is apparently not in the user settings, according to the importer.
 
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Speedometer repair shops started fading away 20 years so now the ones still around mainly work on antique cars. Can these even be calibrated with a scan tool? If it has an actual moving pointer, there might be some adjustability in the mechanism, but that's nothing a Nissan service tech would do.
 
Does the speedometer needle point exactly at zero when the car is on but not moving?
 
Update: The dealership will make it right. They made an appointment at the Nissan dealership for next week. So far, this is going in the right direction.
I sure hope so. Does Nissan even warranty cars that were imported from Canada? Importing cars from Canada to the US often voids the warranty.
 
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