Land Rover is recalling 93,997 Range Rovers because water can pool and ruin the rearview camera

Land Rover is recalling 93,997 Range Rover SUVs in the United States because too few drain holes let water collect around the rearview camera in the tailgate. The campaign covers model years 2022 through 2026. A camera damaged by that moisture can show a distorted picture or none at all, which leaves the driver with a smaller view of what sits behind the vehicle.

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The repair is free. Dealers will drill extra drain holes into the underside of the tailgate trim and replace any camera that has already been damaged, and interim owner letters are due December 11, 2026.

Too few drain holes behind the tailgate trim

Jaguar Land Rover North America filed the report with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on October 15, 2026, and the agency logged it as campaign 26V678000. The filing classes the part as a back-over prevention camera and states the cause in a single sentence: water may not drain away from the rearview camera because of insufficient drain holes, and that water may damage the camera. The consequence it lists is direct. A camera that fails to display reduces the driver’s view behind the vehicle and raises the risk of a crash.

Reporting by Autoevolution on the same filing adds the manufacturer’s own numbers. The SUVs were built in Solihull, England, between July 8, 2021, and June 4, 2026, and Jaguar Land Rover North America estimates that 100 percent of them carry the defect. Its records show 2,295 warranty claims and field reports in the United States from August 3, 2022, through September 28, 2026, with no known accidents or injuries. Motor1 puts those reports at about 2.4 percent of the affected fleet, which matches 2,295 divided by 93,997.

Inside the company, the trail began on July 31, 2026, when its Product Safety and Compliance Committee opened an investigation after warranty data showed high camera replacement rates in the United States and Canada. Staff reviewed every claim by hand, and cameras pulled from vehicles went to the supplier for teardown. The supplier told Jaguar Land Rover that the returned units had failed from water ingress.

One detail in that timeline cuts in an awkward direction. On September 18, 2026, the committee was told that requiring evidence before approving camera replacements had significantly reduced the claim rate. A lower claim rate after a stricter approval step says little about how many cameras are actually failing, so the 2,295 figure is a count of paperwork rather than a count of wet cameras.

Federal rear visibility standard and the 10-by-20-foot zone

Rearview cameras on new vehicles trace to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 111, which NHTSA rewrote in a final rule published in the Federal Register on April 7, 2014. The rule requires that vehicles up to 10,000 pounds gross weight let the driver see a zone 10 feet wide and 20 feet long directly behind the vehicle while in reverse. It names no technology, but the agency expected manufacturers to meet it with rearview video and an in-vehicle display. Full compliance applied to vehicles built on or after May 1, 2018, so every model year in this recall sits inside the regime.

NHTSA counted roughly 267 deaths and 15,000 injuries a year from backover crashes when it wrote the rule, with children under 5 making up about 31 percent of the fatalities and adults 70 and older about 26 percent. Those figures explain why a camera that goes blank is handled as a safety defect, even though this filing reports no injuries.

Interim letters, a second notice and a 2024 camera recall

Owners will hear first through an interim letter. The NHTSA record expects those to be mailed December 11, 2026, and says further letters will follow once the final remedy is available, a date the filing leaves open. It lists Land Rover customer service at 800-637-6837, gives the company’s internal recall number as D171, and marks the park-it, park-outside and over-the-air update flags as false, so no stop-driving advisory accompanies the recall.

Water and the camera have met before on this SUV. About two years earlier, a separate campaign covered 11,961 fifth-generation Range Rovers built from March 2022 to December 2023, and the Autoevolution report says Jaguar Land Rover fixed the cause in production with a revised seal on the tailgate trim piece that houses the camera. NHTSA’s list of Range Rover recalls also holds campaign 24V678, reported September 12, 2024, a different camera fault in which the near-field sensing module may overheat and blank the image.

The open questions sit with the remedy. Drilling holes treats the pooling at its source, but the filing does not say how many of the 93,997 SUVs will need a new camera, and the final-remedy mailing has no date. With 2,295 reports already logged against a fleet that size, the share of cameras that dealers find damaged will be the first real measure of how far the water got.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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