Hyundai is recalling more than 225,000 newer vehicles in the U.S. over concerns regarding their backup cameras failing. More specifically, some 226,118 examples of the automaker’s Elantra sedans and Santa Fe SUVs from model years 2021 and 2022 are covered by the safety campaign Stateside; it’s unclear how many, if any, vehicles are affected in Canada.
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On some of these affected vehicles, the soldering used to connect leads in the cars’ printed circuit boards may not have been applied correctly, and could crack; furthermore, high temperatures generated by the camera when in use could worsen the cracks. If the contact degrades severely enough, this could result in a loss of signal and cause the rearview display on the vehicle touchscreen to, well, not display when it’s supposed to.
Even though Hyundai had amended this problem on its production lines several years ago, ensuring its supplier’s updated cameras had improved soldering on their boards as of April 2022, it’s only now getting around to repairing the vehicles built before that date and equipped with the inferior parts.
Luckily the fix seems easy enough: a swap to the newer-style camera at affected owners’ local Hyundai dealership, performed free of charge.
Hyundai is far from the only automaker to have issued a recall for rearview-camera-related problems over the past year or two. A wide swath of manufacturers – from Ford to Honda, to Jeep to Ram; from Porsche to Audi, to Infiniti – have had to correct defects with the backup cameras in their vehicles.
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