- Nissan, Stellantis and VW are the latest brands to issue recalls over faulty rearview cameras.
- More than 180 camera recalls have been issued since the tech became mandatory in the US.
- Ford is by far the worst offender for both numbers of recalls and number of cars affected.
Let’s have a show of hands for everyone who remembers having a serious problem with a good old fashioned rear-view mirror. That’ll be almost no one then, apart from a few people who managed to kick theirs off the windshield while getting over-amorous with their passenger.
Old-tech mirrors were simple and kept on working, but their modern version, the reversing camera, has turned out to be a reliability disaster zone since the devices became compulsory in the US in the spring of 2018.
Related: Ford’s Backup Camera Might Be Lying To Over 1 Million Drivers
Sometimes the view from the camera fails to transmit to the console screen. In other instances it can be intermittent, unclear or, scariest of all, delayed, giving you a false impression of what’s behind you. And what’s really worrying is that it’s happening a lot.
We’ve crunched the numbers and can tell you that a whopping 181 recalls have been announced due to camera problems since 2018. In total, more than 12.3 million vehicles have been affected by what is usually not a hardware fault, but down to bad software.
This year is proving particularly bad for camera recalls. We’re not even six months in and automakers have already issued 30 recalls for more than 2.8 million vehicles. That’s well above the 2.2 million cars affected in 2024 and double the number of cars hit in 2023. The latest vehicles struck down are 80,000 MY25 Nissan Frontier and Kicks SUVs, and 171,000 VW Atlas and Atlas Cross Sports built from 2024-25.
CAMERA RECALLS BY YEAR
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The biggest offender, and by a country mile, is Ford, which confirmed a 1 million-unit recall earlier this week. In total it’s dished out 35 recalls covering a staggering 4.6 million vehicles since 2018, numbers that make second-place Stellantis (FCA) ordinarily terrible stats – 20 recalls and 1.7 million cars – seem not too bad. Nissan takes third spot in our table with 9 recalls and 1.6 million units, followed by Honda with seven recalls and 1.3 million units
True, those are all big-selling brands, but GM and Toyota prove that it’s possible pump out millions of cars and do it using reliable technology. The former issued just three recalls for 106,000 vehicles while the latter announced five recalls for 95,000 units.
It’s good to know that it is possible to get these systems right because many of us rely on them now, and will only do so more in the future if the trend for blanking off the rear window, as on the Polestar 4 and upcoming Jaguar EV, takes hold across the industry.
CAMERA RECALLS BY BRAND
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