Ram Drag link Recall

mich800 wrote:

Cummins12V98 wrote:
All it effects is centering of the steering wheel. There is a lot of discussion on this subject on the TDR.

Bottom line be sure the two nuts are tight and don't worry about it until they have replacement parts.

I am not sure that is the best advice. There must be an issue withe the design or materials/machining if they are going to lengths to spot weld until a safer version is available. Just because it is tight at the beginning of the drive is no guarantee it cannot loosen up during a drive. I wouldn’t be comfortable giving the advice to ignore something the manufacturer admits is a safety issue.

What can you do other than monitor it, though? My sister had a Pilot that got caught up in that big airbag recall a few years ago. She got a letter from Honda saying there was a safety issue with her car but parts weren't available yet, and it advised her to stop driving it. The faulty water pumps on the Cummins engines were similar, basically your vehicle has a problem but no parts are available so...

I think a lot of the trouble is all the suppliers have optimized processes with the vehicle manufacturers. Basically when you run into a part replacement type recall, you can only build so many extra widgets to replace all the bad ones while still supplying parts for the new vehicles being produced.

In the scheme of things this drag link recall doesn't bother me much. In 4 years and 50,000+ miles mine shows no indication of loosening, but I periodically check it think the likelihood that something goes wrong is pretty low between now and whenever replacement parts are available. I've said many times that the one wort my truck has had has been too many recalls, but reality is recalls are a problem on a lot of newer vehicles.