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Driver Information Centre

The text display that shows trip data, range, service messages, tyre pressures, settings and written warnings — between the dials, in the centre of the dash, or both. Distinct from the instrument cluster, which carries the speedometer, tachometer and gauges and is safety-relevant in its own right; this is the message and menu layer, and on many vehicles it is a separate module.

It measures nothing, so its characteristic failure is showing something wrong rather than showing nothing — and that is the more dangerous of the two. A blank display tells the driver not to trust it; a plausible-looking figure does not. The values that matter are the ones journeys get planned around: remaining range, tyre pressures, outside temperature, and warnings that have stopped being true.

One replacement trap is expensive and in most places also a legal matter. On many vehicles the recorded mileage is stored here rather than only in the engine module, so a second-hand unit brings another vehicle's odometer reading with it. Any replacement must be programmed to the vehicle with the correct figure, and documented.

Also known as: dic, information centre, information center, message centre, message center, driver information display, trip computer display

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Information, not instruction

CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.

Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.

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  • The car — make, model, year and engine. The same fault behaves differently on each.
  • What you measured, not only what you replaced.
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