The steering performance of 236,238 Nissan Sentras has been found wanting, as a recall has identified a weakness in the system. The automaker will now recall the vehicles and replace their weak tie rods for new ones that don’t bend or break under certain driving conditions.
Nissan first became aware of a possible issue in January 2023, when a warranty claim for a model year 2022 Sentra came in whose driver reported that the steering was off-center. The dealer technician who worked on the car found that the front inner tie-rod end was broken, and Nissan took the part for analysis.
Through the winter, the automaker investigated the issue, looking for signs of fatigue fracturing. However, it determined that a bent tie rod was actually what led to a fracture at the ball end housing.
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Nissan conducted material testing to see if there were any faults in the structure, but found none. It also conducted bench testing to determine how strong the parts were, and found that they lived up to design specifications.
However, four more warranty claims came in the spring, leading Nissan to conduct in-vehicle testing. During this examination, its engineers were able to replicate the concerns that customers had when the vehicle hit a large pothole or a curb. In the worst case scenario, that could lead a driver to lose steering control of the vehicle altogether.
Although the car’s tie rods met Nissan’s design specifications, they were not strong enough under certain real-world driving conditions, meaning that it is now launching a recall of 236,238 Sentras from the 2020-2022 model years.
It plans to start getting in touch with owners on October 5 to alert them to this issue, but given the size of the recall, it will have to be conducted in multiple steps. To start, dealers will inspect Sentras to look for bent or broken tie rods, and those will be replaced. Then, once it has enough parts to replace unbroken parts (it expects that will be in the winter of 2023-2024), it will replace all of the remaining tie rods at no cost to the owners.
