Honda received its first report of a Pilot, MDX or TLX losing power steering assist on November 29, 2021. It did not decide the problem was a safety defect until October 22, 2026, and the Honda Pilot power steering recall it filed a week later covers 635,808 vehicles. The filing, NHTSA campaign 26V721, explains much of the gap: when parts came back from the field, they looked fine, because the error codes had been deleted by the dealer or the supplier.
What Honda filed with NHTSA
The population is 383,110 Honda Pilots from model years 2023 through 2025, 177,100 Acura MDX SUVs from 2022 through 2024, and 75,598 Acura TLX sedans from 2021 through 2025. Honda estimates that 100 percent of those vehicles have the defect, so every vehicle in the recall is presumed affected. Pilots make up about 60 percent of the total.
According to the report, the steering supplier, Robert Bosch Automotive Steering LLC, wrote software with an error in a road-condition calculation tied to the Driver Attention Monitor. Under specific conditions the calculation performs a floating-point division with a zero denominator. The software was set to answer that error by switching off power steering assist, which lights the EPS warning indicators in the instrument cluster and leaves the driver with heavier steering. Honda says the failure occurs only when the vehicle is driving straight. The filing gives no speed range and does not say whether assist comes back after the fault.
The arithmetic was not the defect
Dividing by zero in floating-point math produces a result a program can detect and handle, so by itself it does not have to stop anything. The filing places the defect in the response: the software was incorrectly configured to treat that error as a reason to drop assist. A vehicle with an electric steering rack has no hydraulic pump to fall back on, so the driver turns the wheel against the tires and the rack with no motor help. The wheel stays mechanically linked to the front tires, which is why Honda describes heavier steering and reduced controllability rather than lost steering.
My reading is that the straight-ahead condition fits a calculation with very little steering movement to work with. Honda has not said that, and the report does not either.
Why it took until 2026
Honda logged reports from 2021 and worked with the supplier from August 2023 through August 2025, but the returned parts showed no faults. The supplier identified the failure through market-return analysis on August 22, 2025. In December 2025 Honda recreated the problem using dashcam footage and analysis, and in February 2026 it confirmed the driving-straight condition. From May 22, 2022 to October 22, 2026, Honda recorded 146 warranty claims and one report of injury, with no deaths reported.
Roughly eight months passed between the February confirmation and the October 22 determination. Honda then filed its Part 573 report on October 29, which is exactly five working days later and the last day allowed under the federal five-working-day rule. That deadline runs from the determination, so it does not measure how long the investigation took.
A fault that leaves no code behind produces service visits with no diagnosis, and a manufacturer cannot group those visits into a pattern until someone reproduces the failure outside the shop. In this case the reproduction came from a supplier’s analysis of returned parts and from video.
What owners can do
Honda notified dealers on October 30 and lists owner letters for on or about December 14, 2026. The remedy is a dealer reprogramming of the EPS control unit with revised software, and federal law requires recall repairs to be free. Honda’s November 10 release does not tell owners to stop driving.
Owners who have seen an EPS warning light should say so in writing at the service counter and have it recorded on the repair order. Any dashcam clip is worth keeping. A VIN check on NHTSA’s recall page will show coverage once the lookup includes this campaign. Complaints filed with NHTSA are how the agency spots patterns across manufacturers.
Honda has had other recall questions this year. Its handlebar bolt recall grew to 44,000 motorcycles, and we covered the 2023 HR-V rear glass complaints that Honda had not treated as a recall.
Honda had a first report in 2021 and 146 warranty claims before it called this a safety defect in 2026. Should a manufacturer be required to act on a cluster of unexplained steering complaints before it can reproduce the fault, or is waiting for proof the right call?
About the Author
