1994 chevy pick up… hit by lightning. I lost all of the above but the cruise control works. Any cheap easy ideas?? Or even a good idea?
There may be an electronic speed sensor in the dash or elsewhere that ties to those displays and it got damaged by the lightning.
The vehicle speed sensor feeds all of these. It’s screwed into the tranny housing.
Have you tried slapping the instrument cluster to see if there’s any life at all? Seriously. If a needle jumps a bit you might have gotten a momentary connection. I had a speedometer problem while the cruise control worked fine. The speedo would quit, I’d slap the instrument panel and the gauge would start working again. Turned out to be a loose wire to the back of the speedometer. Yours might be a loose connection for the cluster, something in common there, but not the cruise control.
FWIW, We’ve had the tranny speed sensor go out too, and then we lose both speedometer and cruise control, as well as overdrive and tranny shift points.
Lightning does strange things. I used to work on convenience store cash registers. When we had stores that had lightning strikes, we had all kinds of different results. Sometimes it blew both registers up. Sometimes just one. Sometimes it just required a software reload. Sometimes it would blow up all the lights in the store and sometimes they would go untouched. I’ve also seen it cause zero damage. Depends on where it hits and where it finds a path to ground. If I had a vehicle struck by lighting, I would be very concerned about the whole electrical system.