Owners of select Jeep Wrangler and Grand Cherokee models in the United States may find themselves with a fogged up windshield and unable to clear it because of an issue with the defrosting system. The fault has prompted Jeep to issue a recall for affected vehicles.
The recall notice issued through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) specifies that impacted vehicles may have been built with incorrectly programmed hybrid control processor software. If this is the case then the windshield defrost system will be disabled under certain conditions which, as you can probably imagine, could be quite a nuisance, as well as a safety issue if you live in a cold area.
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A total of 199,143 vehicles are impacted. These consist of 139,318 Jeep Wranglers from the 2021-2024 model years and assembled between September 2, 2020, and August 24, 2023, as well as 59,825 Grand Cherokees from the 2022-2024 model years and built from July 23, 2021, to December 5, 2023.
Jeep was alerted to a potential issue with the defrost system in June last year and over the proceeding six months, analyzed which of its vehicles may have a non-functional system. It then decided to launch the voluntary safety recall earlier this month.
Both dealers and owners will be alerted to the recall around April 5 and the problem will be rectified by simply updating the software of the hybrid control processor, a fix that will be performed free of charge.
This is far from the only recall issued for Wrangler and Grand Cherokee models in the U.S. over the past six months. In November last year, 32,125 examples of the plug-in Wrangler 4xe were recalled because of a fire risk. In August, some 162,731 Jeep models, including 2022-2023 Grand Cherokees, were recalled as the reversing camera may not have displayed an image on the media screen.
