Losing power steering without warning in a commercial van loaded with cargo is not a minor inconvenience. It is a crash waiting to happen. FCA US is now recalling nearly 266,000 Ram ProMaster vans because water can seep into the electric power steering wiring harness, corrode the connections, and kill steering assist entirely.
The recall covers model year 2022 through 2026 ProMaster 1500, 2500, and 3500 vans, plus the 2024-2026 ProMaster 3500 electric models. FCA estimates about 7.7% of the recalled vehicles actually have the defect, which still means roughly 20,000 vans rolling around with a ticking clock in their steering columns.
Here is the part that should bother every ProMaster owner: the fix is not ready yet. FCA told dealers the remedy, which involves inspecting and potentially replacing the wiring harness or entire electric power steering gear with improved sealing, won’t be available until the fourth quarter of this year. Interim notification letters to owners won’t even go out until Nov. 17, leaving thousands of fleet operators and delivery drivers in limbo for months.
The timeline of how this unfolded tells its own story. NHTSA flagged the issue to FCA back in September 2025 after receiving just nine owner complaints. The automaker didn’t launch its internal investigation until January 2026 and didn’t start examining the specific water intrusion problem until March.
By then, NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation had already opened its own probe, citing 19 owner complaints about steering failures in 2022-2023 model year vans. When NHTSA pressed FCA for data in June, the numbers ballooned. The automaker found 437 customer records, 2,799 warranty claims, and 191 field reports spanning from April 2022 to June 2026.
By September, FCA had identified an additional 974 related reports, bringing the total to 4,401 potential warranty claims and reports tied to power steering loss. One accident has been linked to the defect, though no injuries were reported.
Four years of warranty claims. Nearly 4,400 reports. The defect spans almost the entire current production run of the ProMaster line.
FCA also quietly recalled about 8,400 Mopar body and jumper wiring harnesses sold through dealers as replacement parts. That means some vans that had already been serviced may have received parts carrying the same vulnerability.
This recall lands on a pile. In the last two months alone, FCA has recalled 239,000 Ram 1500 trucks for backup camera failures, 328,000 Jeep Grand Cherokees for rear coil spring problems, and 1.3 million Ram pickups for seat belt buckle anchor bolts. The ProMaster action adds another quarter-million vehicles to a recall drumbeat that shows no sign of slowing.
The ProMaster is the workhorse of last-mile delivery fleets across the country. Amazon, FedEx contractors, and countless small businesses depend on these vans daily. The failure mode here, sudden loss of steering assist with no advance warning other than a dashboard light that may or may not illuminate, is exactly the kind of defect that turns a routine delivery route into a liability crisis.
FCA says the electric power steering fault light “may” come on. That qualifier carries a lot of weight when you are muscling a 6,500-pound van through city traffic with dead steering.
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