Stellantis Has Recalled the Same Backup Camera Bug Seven Times. It Keeps Shipping.

On August 17, Stellantis filed a recall for 955,000 vehicles worldwide because Uconnect radio software can blank out the rearview camera display.^[1] Consumer Reports covered the filing with an unusual editorial addendum, listing six previous Stellantis backup camera recalls issued over the past four years for the same category of defect.^[2]

Seven campaigns following the same pattern: Uconnect software prevents the camera feed from reaching the screen. The June 2024 campaign alone covered 1,033,433 vehicles across model years 2021 through 2023, while two mid-2025 campaigns added another 454,000 ProMaster vans and Dodge Journeys stretching back to 2019.^[3][4] Now the 2026 and 2027 model years, vehicles built after every prior patch shipped, have the same problem in entirely new code.

ISO 26262, the automotive functional safety standard, calls the relevant principle “freedom from interference”: a non-safety software component like a radio tuner should not be architecturally capable of disabling a safety-critical system like a backup camera.^[5] Stellantis’s Uconnect platform routes the camera feed through the same media display pipeline that handles radio, navigation, and CarPlay, which means a fault in any subsystem can take the camera down with it. Each OTA patch fixes the specific code path that broke while leaving the coupling intact for the next software version to fail identically.

In FARS data from 2014 through 2023, the models covered by this recall chain account for 6,963 occupant deaths across Stellantis brands, nearly 30% of all Stellantis fatalities in the dataset.^[6] Among the affected vehicles is the Chrysler Pacifica, a minivan marketed to families with young children, and backover crashes disproportionately kill children under five. Stellantis has reported zero injuries across all seven campaigns, each recall was filed voluntarily and remedied at no charge, and the individual bugs are technically separate defects in different software versions. But an automaker that files the same category of recall seven times in four years is not having seven unrelated bad days; it is shipping a system architecture that permits a known failure mode and patching retroactively instead of redesigning the pipeline.

If you drive any 2019–2027 Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, or Ram: check your VIN at nhtsa.gov/recalls, test your camera display every time you start the vehicle, and if the screen blanks in reverse, walk behind the car before backing up. Install the OTA update the moment it appears, or visit a dealer for the free fix and contact Stellantis at 1-800-853-1403 or recalls.mopar.com with any questions.