Chrysler, the Stellantis unit that sells Ram trucks, has told federal regulators that the tire pressure sensors on 16,385 2026 Ram 1500 pickups may fail to detect low pressure or fail to light the dashboard warning, which means a truck could roll along on a soft tire without telling its driver. Chrysler filed the campaign with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as 26V623000 on Sept. 29, and the brand’s own recall code for it is 51D.
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The wording that matters most is a legal one. The sensors leave the trucks out of compliance with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 138, the rule that requires a warning when a tire is significantly underinflated. A truck that breaks that standard has a defect of function, not merely of convenience.
Sensors that may never light the warning
Chrysler’s filing describes a tire pressure monitoring sensor that may report incorrect pressure, and the agency’s campaign record states the result plainly: the sensors may fail to detect low pressure or to illuminate the warning as intended. The risk Chrysler identified is that an inaccurate indication of tire pressure may lead to a tire failure, which raises the chance of a crash.
The filing is also candid about what a driver would see beforehand. Asked what warning a driver gets before a failure, the manufacturer’s answer in the filing was “none prior to failure,” meaning there is no earlier cue to rely on. The telltale may light only once the failure has already happened. A pickup that is carrying a load or towing a trailer is the case where an unnoticed soft tire does the most harm, and an early dashboard warning is the one safeguard the standard demands.
A process change in the tire and wheel assembly
Where the defect came from is laid out in Chrysler’s Part 573 safety report. The company’s own defect filing leaves the formal root-cause field blank, but it ties the problem to the build: a process change was made in the tire and wheel assembly on July 1, 2025. Trucks built from that date through March 17, 2026 are the population, and Chrysler estimates that 100 percent of them have the defect.
The remedy sensor tells much of the rest of the story. Chrysler says the replacement part was not damaged during the mounting of the tire on the rim, which implies the original sensors were being damaged at the point where the tire was fitted to the wheel. The company does not say so in those words, and the filing gives no more detail on how the damage happens. The part is a Sensata Technologies sensor, part number 68293199AA, and the filing names the Attleboro, Massachusetts, company as its source.
Chrysler’s chronology shows the problem was slow to come into focus. Its technical safety group opened an investigation on March 17, 2026, into inoperative tire pressure monitoring in some 2026 Ram 1500 trucks, then spent roughly six months with engineering and supplier quality defining the failure modes and the suspect population. The group concluded on Sept. 16 that a build issue could violate the standard, a regulations committee found a noncompliance on Sept. 22, and the report went to Washington on Sept. 29.
One detail in the dates stands out. The suspect build window closes on March 17, 2026, the same day Chrysler’s technical safety group opened its investigation, so the trucks in the field were built across roughly eight and a half months, from July 1, 2025, before anyone at the company had started looking.
Inspection, replacement and the owner timeline
The fix is an inspection followed by replacement of the sensors where needed. Dealers will do the work at no cost to owners. The agency’s record lists the park-it, park-outside and over-the-air flags as false, so Chrysler is not telling owners to stop driving the truck, and no software update is involved; the work happens on the wheel, with the tire coming off.
The campaign is phased. Dealers were notified on or about Oct. 6, the same day vehicle identification numbers became searchable on the agency’s site, and owner letters are expected to begin on Oct. 27. Chrysler does not plan any interim letter, so the first notice owners get from the company is the one that lands in this window. Reimbursement, where an owner has already paid for a sensor, follows the manufacturer’s general plan on file with the agency, and the filing gives no separate schedule.
An owner who wants an answer before the letter can use NHTSA’s recall lookup with the truck’s VIN, or call Chrysler customer service at 1-800-853-1403 and quote recall 51D. The filing’s population is bounded on both ends: it opens with the July 2025 process change and closes in March 2026. Because the suspect build window ends in March 2026, trucks assembled after that date are outside the campaign.
The agency’s campaign page and the federal recall dataset covering reports filed from Sept. 29 to Oct. 7 agree on 16,385. Chrysler gives its estimate of the defect rate in that population as 100 percent, so the campaign treats every one of those trucks as suspect rather than a sample of them.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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