Mazda Recalled the CX-90's Steering. Three Times. It's Still Broken.

You got the letter, called the dealer, dropped off your 2024 Mazda CX-90 for Recall 24V022, the one about the steering going stiff mid-turn. They replaced a spring, regreased the worm gear, flashed a software update. You drove home believing the system worked the way it was supposed to: manufacturer finds defect, manufacturer fixes defect, owner gets on with life. Except NHTSA complaint filings on recalled-and-repaired CX-90s spiked from roughly 3 per month to 34 per month in early 2026, and the agency has opened an investigation into whether the recall remedy did anything at all.^[1]

The CX-90's steering saga started before the vehicle was a year old. Mazda began investigating in November 2022, before deliveries even ramped up, after test engineers noticed the electric power steering assembly's worm gear could shed its lubricant under sustained spring pressure. Grease migrated away from the gear teeth, friction climbed, and the steering wheel suddenly demanded more force than the driver expected. On a highway merge at 65 mph, "more force than expected" is the kind of phrase that precedes a lane departure.

Their first countermeasure modified the tooth geometry on the worm wheel to hold grease better, but the modification did not hold grease better. Their second, which became the formal recall in January 2024, swapped in a redesigned spring to reduce the force pushing grease out, applied fresh lubricant, and added a software patch that would theoretically detect resistance building before the driver felt it. That covered 43,752 vehicles built between December 2022 and December 2023.^[2] Owners brought their cars in, and both Mazda and NHTSA considered the matter addressed.

The matter was not addressed, and by January 2026, the Office of Defects Investigation had accumulated 26 new complaints and multiple early warning field reports from owners whose vehicles had already received the recall repair, all describing the same symptom: sudden, intermittent spikes in steering effort during normal driving. Two crashes were linked to the post-repair condition.^[3] NHTSA opened Recall Query RQ26002 to assess whether Mazda's redesigned steering gear assembly actually solved the problem it was engineered to solve.

A quantitative analysis of NHTSA's own complaint data, drawn from the 2.23-million-row ODI complaint database, shows the signal is not subtle. CX-90 steering complaints had been running at roughly 3 per month from 2022 through 2025. After the recall remedy was deployed, they climbed to 20 to 34 per month through the first half of 2026, totaling 147 steering-related filings with 5 reported crashes and 3 injuries. When scored against every other major manufacturer's complaint trajectory using a trailing 24-month baseline, Mazda registers as the statistical outlier at a z-score of +2.0, driven almost entirely by CX-90 steering.^[4]

The deeper absurdity is structural. NHTSA measures recall completion: did the vehicle visit a dealer? As of February 2026, the agency reported a 50.3% overall completion rate across all active recalls, leaving an estimated 14 million vehicles with open safety notices sitting in driveways and parking garages.^[5] That 50.3% is the number everyone cites as the problem. But the CX-90 reveals a second, unmeasured gap: among the vehicles that did go to the dealer and did receive the repair, how many actually got fixed? NHTSA has no systematic answer to that question. There is no post-remedy complaint velocity metric, no standardized follow-up audit, no mechanism to flag a repair that produced a tenfold increase in the symptom it was supposed to eliminate. The CX-90 owners who complied with the recall notice are, in the agency's tracking systems, a success story.

Mazda, meanwhile, is getting squeezed from both directions at once. A class-action lawsuit, Burnell v. Mazda Motor Corporation, was filed in March 2026 alleging that the CX-90's steering and braking defects persist despite recall repairs and repeated dealer visits, and that Mazda knew about similar failure patterns on prior models.^[6] CX-90 sales in the U.S. are down approximately 40% year-to-date. Mazda's full-year earnings through March 2026 came in at roughly $235 million, a 69% decline, and a potential expanded recall covering CX-90 and CX-70 models across multiple model years could plausibly cost the same order of magnitude as that entire year's profit.^[4]

Three engineering attempts, one formal recall, twenty-six post-repair complaints that NHTSA considered serious enough to reopen the investigation, and a complaint velocity curve that did the opposite of what "fixed" is supposed to look like. If you own a CX-90 and you have received the recall repair, you should know that NHTSA is not currently confident the repair worked. Check your VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls and keep your service records documenting the recall repair date. Pay attention to any change in steering effort, particularly during highway-speed maneuvers, lane changes, and turns from a stop. File a complaint at nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem if you experience it, because the only way NHTSA knows the fix did not work is if you tell them.