Showing km/h on the dash of a USA Sprinter

If you ever drive “North of the border” into Canada with your US-specced Sprinter van, you’ll soon start to curse Mercedes’ decision not to put kilometer per hour markings on the speedometer.

Luckily, if you have the highline dash display (steering wheel with buttons) there’s a fix that lets you see your speed in Km/h in the status bar section in the lower half of the display, where you normally see the temperature.

Mercedes calls this the “digital speedometer” and they tell you how to set it up it on page 170 of the 2016 manual.

Selecting the unit for the digital speedometer
-- Using the steering wheel buttons, press the [next menu] or [previous menu] button repeatedly until the Settings menu appears in the display.
-- Press the [up] button to switch to the sub-menu selection.
-- Press the [+] or [-] button to select the Inst. cluster submenu.
-- Press the [up] button to select the Dig. speedo. function. The selection marker is on the current setting.
-- Press the [+] or [-] button to select the unit for the digital speedometer: km/h or mph.

Then, you have to actually display this digital speedometer in the status bar.

-- Press the [up] button to select the Select disp. function. The selection marker is on the current setting.
-- Press the [+] or [-] button to select whether to display the outside temperature or the speed (digital speedometer). 
The selected display is then shown permanently in the lower part of the display.

It’s not a great substitute for having both sets of numbers on the dial itself, but it beats doing mental arithmetic to divide the road sign speed limits by 1.6 each time.

Select MPH or km/h for the secondary dash display  Show temperature in the secondary dash displayShow speed in the secondary dash display

2 Replies to “Showing km/h on the dash of a USA Sprinter”

  1. Another solution is to use a TomTom or a mobile app such as Waze to show the current speed based on GPS. The big advantage with that is that it will also likely show you the current speed restriction.

    Network coverage might be a challenge for the mobile apps given some of the places you get to, in which case the more expensive TomTom solution is the superior one.

    Happy Christmas to my favourite adventurers!

    A,K,L and A xx

    1. Yeah – even the Google Maps app is starting to show speed restrictions, so the dash display isn’t quite so important. Still, it’s nice to have a dash-based backup.

      Lots of xmas cheer in your direction, too.

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