Jaguar Land Rover North America is recalling 371 model year 2024 Land Rover Defender vehicles because a second-row seat belt may be improperly stitched, a flaw that could leave a rear passenger without the restraint the belt is supposed to provide in a crash. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration filed the campaign as 26V615000 after the automaker reported the problem on Sept. 24, 2026.
No fix is available yet. Owner letters are expected to begin on Nov. 20, 2026, and the dealer repair is free. The population is small by recall standards, which makes the details of the defect and the remedy the useful part of the story for anyone who owns or rides in one of the affected SUVs.
An improperly stitched belt in the second row
The filing is blunt about the mechanism. In the NHTSA campaign record, the manufacturer’s summary reads, “The second-row seat belt may be improperly stitched.” The listed consequence follows from that: an improperly stitched belt may fail to properly restrain an occupant during a crash, which raises the risk of injury. The record classes the component as seat belts, rear or other, webbing, stitching, and it gives the potential number of affected units as 371, all of them 2024 Defenders.
Trade coverage of the weekly federal recall batch carried the same wording. Vehicle Service Pros summarized the filing in its roundup of recalls for early October, repeating that Jaguar Land Rover North America is recalling 371 vehicles and that the belt may fail to restrain an occupant.
The recall is limited to a single model year, 2024, and the filing concerns only the second row. Other model years and other seating positions are not named in campaign 26V615000, so the notice gives owners of those vehicles nothing to act on. The potential-units figure of 371 is also an upper bound on exposure, since the filing describes the number as potentially affected and not as confirmed defective, and the serial-number check at the dealer is what separates a belt that needs replacing from one that does not.
What owners can expect from the remedy
The repair is an inspection first and a replacement only where needed. According to the filing, dealers will check the second-row seat belt serial number and replace the belt as necessary, free of charge. That serial-number step suggests the problem is confined to belts from a specific production run rather than every belt in every Defender, although the record does not say how many of the 371 vehicles will actually need a new belt. Land Rover’s own recall number for the campaign is D130, and the company’s customer service line is 800-637-6837.
Timing is the part that leaves owners waiting. The filing says interim letters are expected to be mailed on Nov. 20, 2026, with additional letters to follow once the final remedy is available. In other words, the first notice will arrive before the permanent fix does. Until then, a Defender owner can confirm whether a specific vehicle is included by entering its VIN in NHTSA’s recall lookup, which reports whether a vehicle has an unrepaired recall.
How a rear belt is supposed to hold under Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 209
Seat belt assemblies sold in the United States have to meet Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 209, which applies to belts used in passenger cars, multipurpose passenger vehicles, trucks and buses. Reading the regulation, the webbing carries minimum breaking-strength requirements, and complete belt assemblies are put through loop tests. The standard sets the bar for the finished product, and a manufacturing error such as the one described in this campaign is the kind of defect an automaker can only discover and report once vehicles are already on the road.
The rear seat matters because belt use there lags. NHTSA reports on its seat belt safety page that in 2024 nearly 60% of back seat passengers killed in a crash were unbuckled, and that rear belts still improve survival chances. A recall that touches the second row therefore affects passengers who are already the least likely to be belted, which is a reason the agency and the automaker push owners to complete the repair once parts are ready.
The scale of the safety benefit explains why even a 371-vehicle recall draws attention. NHTSA estimates that seat belts saved 14,955 lives in 2017, and 374,276 lives from 1975 through 2017, with the national use rate at 91.3% in 2025. Those numbers depend on belts doing their job in the rare moment they are loaded, which is why a stitching error in webbing is treated as a safety defect and not a cosmetic one.
The open questions are narrow ones. The campaign record does not say how the stitching error was found or which production dates are involved, and it does not describe the final remedy beyond the inspection and replacement. For owners, the practical steps are to watch for the Nov. 20 letter, call Land Rover with recall number D130 if none arrives, and book the dealer visit once the final remedy is announced. NHTSA advises that all children under 13 ride in the back seat, so checking the VIN early costs nothing for households that use the second row regularly.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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