Ford Motor Co. has asked federal regulators to let it skip a recall on approximately 76,125 Ranger pickups after acknowledging the trucks’ dashboards drop the unit label next to the speed reading for about four seconds whenever a driver switches drive modes. The company told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in a petition made public September 21, 2026, that the gap violates a federal safety standard but poses no real risk, since the numeric speed figure itself never disappears. The trucks involved are 2024 and 2025 model-year Rangers built between December 9, 2022, and August 29, 2025.
Federal rules let an automaker request an exemption from a full recall when it can show a violation is inconsequential to safety, rather than notifying every owner and repairing every truck. Ford’s petition, still open for public comment, is the latest attempt to use that exemption for a digital instrument-cluster glitch rather than a mechanical part, and it follows two comparable rulings the company is now citing as its own precedent.
A four-second blank spot during drive-mode changes
Ford traced the gap to the animation that plays across the Ranger’s instrument cluster whenever a driver shifts among drive modes, such as from normal driving to an off-road setting. During that roughly four-second sequence, “the primary speedometer’s numerical speed remains continuously and accurately displayed,” Ford wrote in the petition it filed with NHTSA, but the letters marking whether that number means miles per hour or kilometers per hour disappear until the animation finishes — a violation of paragraphs S5.1.2 and S5.2.1 of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 101.
Standard No. 101 exists so a driver never has to guess which unit a number represents, particularly in a truck sold with a display that can toggle between the two internationally interchangeable measurements. Ford’s petition does not dispute that the four-second gap violates that requirement; it argues only that the violation carries no real-world consequence, because the number underneath the missing label never changes.
Ford’s noncompliance report reached NHTSA on September 11, 2025, and its formal exemption petition followed on October 3, 2025 — nearly a year before the Federal Register carried public notice of it. To gauge how often drivers would even encounter the gap, Ford pulled usage data from 8,800 Rangers already in service and found drivers switched among drive modes less than 5 percent of the time recorded.
Two earlier rulings Ford is leaning on
Ford’s petition points to two prior NHTSA decisions as precedent, both involving vehicles that briefly lost part of their instrument-cluster information rather than a physical safety part. In 2022, NHTSA granted a petition from automaker FCA covering roughly 2.5 million vehicles whose speedometers could be switched to show only kilometers per hour, reasoning that a driver seeing an unexpectedly high number — 40 on a km/h-only display, for instance, where the truck was really moving closer to 25 mph — would likely slow down rather than speed up, the opposite of a dangerous overcorrection.
In 2016, NHTSA granted a similar petition from General Motors covering about 2,747 GMC Sierra Denali trucks whose instrument cluster could reset and briefly go dark under a narrow combination of driver actions: active navigation, multiple cluster warnings, an incoming call and a media-device search running at once. NHTSA called that combination “improbable because multiple specific actions must be taken by the driver and/or passenger simultaneously,” and noted the reset lasted about 1.3 seconds before the cluster restored itself without help.
No crashes, injuries or complaints, Ford says
Ford’s petition states that the company is unaware of any crashes, injuries or complaints tied to the missing unit label, and argues a recall would create more disruption than the defect itself. Reflashing software in all 76,125 affected trucks, the company told NHTSA, would address a display quirk that, by its own count, appears for about four seconds at a time in under one in twenty drive-mode changes.
The exemption Ford is requesting would not clear its dealers to sell any Ranger still sitting on a lot once Ford has told them about the noncompliance; under the rule governing this process, 49 CFR part 556, that sales prohibition holds regardless of how NHTSA eventually rules. Ford’s petition, filed under 49 U.S.C. 30118 and 30120, affects only its own notification and repair obligations, not the separate duty a dealer already carries once told a truck on the lot fails a federal safety standard.
A public comment period that runs through October 21
NHTSA has not ruled on Ford’s petition. The docket stayed open for public comment through October 21, 2026, the same 30-day window the agency used before granting the FCA and General Motors petitions Ford is now citing as precedent, and the outcome is not guaranteed — NHTSA has denied comparable display-noncompliance petitions from other automakers when it judged the safety margin too thin to excuse.
Owners who want to check whether their own Ranger falls inside the affected build window can search it through NHTSA’s public recall and complaint database, the same tool that would carry a formal recall notice if the agency denies Ford’s request instead of granting it. Until NHTSA rules, the four-second gap Ford wants excused stays exactly as built: unresolved, unrecalled, and present on every one of the 76,125 trucks the company has already identified.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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