The automaker has issued just nine recalls all year and we might have seen why

Nissan might just be turning a corner, and not a small one. During Q3 this year, the company saw sales climb 5.3 percent compared with the same period in 2024. Across 2025 so far, it’s up 1.5 percent overall, a success that comes down to several factors. One that likely goes overlooked is just how reliable its current lineup is proving to be.

Read: Nissan Could Join Toyota And Sell US-Made Cars In Japan

As of this writing, GM has issued 36 recalls this year. Chrysler has issued 46. Ford has broken the record over and over by issuing 138 to date. Nissan (including Infiniti) has issued just nine all year long. After touring the automaker’s US production facilities in Tennessee, we might have an idea of why that figure is so low.

Can Total Control Build Better Cars?

Take a good look at many of the recalls that come out each month, and one thing stands out: suppliers are often a part of the problem. Nissan has plenty of suppliers as well, but the brand’s internal quality control is genuinely impressive.

In Decherd, Tennessee, the automaker builds engines entirely from raw materials. Rolled steel enters the facility, and what leaves are finished, fully functional engine components.

From dies to castings to machined components, Nissan controls the entire process. There’s no anonymous supplier stamping out blocks in another state (or country).

Nissan treats its Tennessee plant like a vertically integrated engine workshop. That matters because outsourcing requires negotiations. Nissan’s method turns tolerances into a guarantee.

Lab-Level Precision

Inside the production facility, we found what might as well be a scientific lab. Parts get checked down to microns, each one of which is a 70th of a human hair.

More impressively, this happens relatively close to the stamping and casting areas of the building. To ensure accurate readings, the measurement lab has its own special foundation to eliminate vibration interference.

Then, there’s the way that Nissan torture tests its engines. Ever notice how many old Altimas are still running around? Some of that comes down to the efforts of engine dynamometer techs. They come up with and then test production engines until they break.

They’ll test them with low oil, slightly overheated, at maximum RPM for hours, and then break down the engine to figure out where its weak points are.

The X-Ray Room

Finally, a separate team pulls parts off the assembly line every day to X-ray and CT-scan them. In fact, they use a Nikon VOXLS 40 c 450, a machine worth over $1.2 million, to accomplish this task. It allows engineers to look inside the production line parts and find potential issues before they make it to the real world.

This is the kind of detailed quality control that has helped Nissan go through most of 2025 with recalls issued in the single digits.

Take a deeper look at the nine recalls Nissan has this year, and it’s an interesting mix. The second largest one affects 173,301 vehicles and routes back to a supplier in Mexico, where the affected cars were made. Others include things like the wrong weight rating on a label, windshield air bubbles obscuring visibility, and daytime running light malfunctions.

Now, to be clear, nobody is saying that Nissan makes perfect cars. No automaker does, and in fact, the brand’s biggest recall of the year involved more than 440,000 cars over an engine bearing issue. Notably, Nissan just released an updated report on that recall specifying that fewer than two percent of the affected cars in the recall likely have a real problem.

That could explain why it managed to get out of the factory in the first place. Ultimately, Nissan seems to be doing something right at its US manufacturing plants. Taking complete control of the production process appears to be making a big impact down the road.

Photos Stephen Rivers for Carscoops