2000 Silverado Loss of speedometer and odometer

Bampa · January 1, 2018

This is my second time posting for this problem; the last time was about a year ago with no responses. About a year and a half ago, my speedometer suddenly went dead. My usual mechanic said he's seen a few of these and it's always been the stepper motor in the gauge. He has a place to send them out for complete rebuilding with all new motors for a lot less than what Chevrolet charges, so we did it. A couple weeks later, we got my dash cluster back and installed it; no difference, it was still dead. OK, he said if it wasn't that and all my other gauges are working OK (except my intermittent fuel gauge that has been bad for about 10 years or so), it must be the sending unit at the tranny. I picked one up at my local parts store and installed it. Still no good! In the mean time, my change engine oil light came on, which makes me believe it is still recording mileage but just not getting the info from the computer to the dash. My thought now is a bad harness somewhere that is getting progressively worse; first the fuel gauge and now the speed/odometers. I feel even more evidence is that when the fuel gauge pegs to empty going down the road, if I shift up into neutral, it usually reconnects and it shoots back to reading correctly (for awhile anyway). Possible frayed harness in the steering column? Any help in this would be welcome since I'll be coming up for the second inspection in March with this problem and it'll still show the same mileage as last year. I also kind of need the odometer, since with the fuel gauge being intermittent, I used to rely on the number of miles driven to know when to fill up. Now I'm topping up weekly just to be safe.

Since I don't get to check the forum often, my standard email address is [email protected]

carnau · January 2, 2018

There is a harness that runs right over the top of the transmission. I would start there.

ShawnR · January 4, 2018

Mid-December I lost all my gauges and odo display. Off one week, on one week, now off again. I've got a rebuilt cluster coming from Dorman that should be here any day. I'll post my results. GM had a service bulletin offering a replacement cluster 8 years or 80k miles on some early 2000 trucks so they knew there was a big problem.

ShawnR · January 7, 2018

My re-manufactured gauge cluster seems to work fine. I'm optimistic since my old cluster was not working for more than a couple days at a time. The old gauge cluster must've had a bad board to have such a catastrophic failure. I was sure to comment on my core return the intermittent loss of all gauges so Dorman wouldn't send it out to a customer with just new steppers and light bulbs.