Kia Telluride Instrument Cluster Lawsuit , The Dashboard That Goes Black While You’re Driving — and Kia’s Response That’s Leaving Owners Furious

Imagine yourself merging onto a freeway outside of Nashville or Kansas City. This type of mid-speed merge necessitates a brief look at the speedometer to make sure you’re keeping up with traffic flow. The instrument panel is black when you gaze down at it. Not dimmed. not having issues with incomplete data. All black, all the same. There is no longer a speed readout. There is no longer a fuel gauge. The gear indicator is missing, which is helpful when you’re unsure if the transmission switched properly on an uphill.

Additionally, you can’t see the 35 warning lights that could be alerting you to something crucial about the car you’re driving at highway speed. This is the situation at the heart of the Kia Telluride instrument cluster lawsuit. An increasing number of owners have detailed this experience with the NHTSA and in online forums, expressing the particular annoyance of those who purchased a high-end family SUV and had higher expectations.

The 2023, 2024, and 2025 Kia Telluride is the target of the class action. It is a car that has truly earned its reputation in the midsize SUV market, winning accolades and cultivating a devoted following thanks to its superior interior quality, standard features, and value positioning in comparison to luxury rivals. The Telluride’s switch to a fully digital instrument cluster contributed to its upscale appearance; one of the cabin’s more noticeable features is the panoramic display that spans the driver’s field of vision.

The lawsuit claims that Kia was aware of the issue prior to these model years going on sale and that the same digital architecture that provides that premium experience is the source of a defect that causes the entire cluster to suddenly freeze, glitch, or go black while the vehicle is in motion.

This is more than just a warranty issue because of the safety aspect. With their actual needles and specialized gauges, analog instrument clusters possessed a fail-safe feature that digital clusters don’t naturally inherit. The driver still has the other needles in case one becomes stuck. The other lightbulbs continue to function even if one fails.

Speed, fuel level, gear selection, and the whole range of driver aid and warning indicators that contemporary cars employ to transmit everything from tire pressure to collision alerts are all taken away at once by a fully computerized display that turns dark. As intended, the Telluride’s cluster lacks an analog backup. The lawsuit claims that because there is no backup plan in case the screen goes dark, the fault represents a safety concern rather than just a convenience flaw.

When owners describe their experiences online, the dealership issue is the aspect that has caused the most ongoing annoyance. The cluster failures seem to be sporadic, brought on by certain circumstances that could include temperature, vibration, electrical load, or an unidentified mix of these factors. The display usually functions normally in the controlled atmosphere of a service bay when owners bring the car in for maintenance.

After performing a diagnostic and finding no stored fault codes, the technician returns the vehicle undamaged. Three days later, the screen on the freeway becomes black once more after the owner leaves. The class action’s claim that Kia hasn’t offered a long-term solution and hasn’t sufficiently acknowledged the extent of the issue is based on this cycle: failure, denial, repetition.

Earlier in the year, Kia issued a recall for over 40,000 cars that addressed signal noise and overheating measures that were found to be the root cause of blank display incidents. Dealer-applied fixes and over-the-air software updates were used to handle the recall, and the business probably thought this resolved the underlying issue.

The class action was filed and is still ongoing because many owners report that the problems continued after the software update: the same blacked-out screens, the same inability to replicate on demand at the dealership, and the lack of a comprehensive recall addressing what the plaintiffs describe as an underlying hardware or design flaw rather than a software anomaly that a patch can fix.