If you've bought a new Nissan in the last year or so, it could be putting you and any passengers you carry at risk. A new recall published with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration names four Nissan sedan, crossover, and pickup models from the 2025 and 2026 model years, warning that they may have been delivered with improperly welded door strikers, which could cause the doors to open while the vehicles are in motion or in a crash. While the recall only impacts 26,432 Nissan vehicles, the NHTSA recall report says that a total of 375,212 door strikers are suspected to be faulty, which means that Nissan cannot isolate the issue to one specific door on any impacted vehicle — any or all of them could open unexpectedly. This is particularly concerning for those with young families, and the cars named in the recall are particularly popular with the practically minded.
Which Nissan Models Have Potentially Unsafe Door Strikers
Cole Attisha/Autoblog
The recalled vehicles, which fail to comply with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard #206, Door Locks and Door Retention Components, are as follows:
- 2025 Nissan Altima
- 2025-2026 Nissan Frontier
- 2026 Nissan Kicks
- 2025 Nissan Sentra
The issue was first reported in late August last year, when a technician performing a fit and function check on a 2025 Sentra noticed that the striker wire loop had separated from the door striker plate. Through the following month and October 2025, the supplier investigated the issue and reported that the fracture condition was caused by an improper welding process, which caused partial quench fractures due to an increased cooling rate. When the fractured component is subjected to tensile stress, the cracks propagate. In January 2026, Nissan determined that this could cause the door striker loop to separate when the door is shut. Alarmingly, in some cases, an owner may not even notice anything amiss before a door unexpectedly opens while driving.
What Nissan Owners Need to Know About Nissan's Latest Safety Recall
The NHTSA says that customers may notice a rattling sound coming from the door striker if only one side of the striker wire cracked, but if both sides crack, "there may be no warning prior to failure." The good news is that, while this is a hardware-related problem, it will be easy to solve. Nissan dealers will replace "all door strikers" with updated components at no charge to the customer, and the fix is expected to take less than half an hour to perform. Dealers will be notified and customers will be able to search their VINs on nhtsa.gov on January 28, but a remedy notification for owners is only expected on March 13, so customers will have to wait another month and a half for their doors to be properly secured. In the meantime, parents should be extra-cautious as child locks won't necessarily be enough to keep kids from opening the door while driving.
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