There’s a special kind of irony in the fact that the two oldest vehicles in General Motors’ entire catalog just got recalled, not because they’re ancient, but because somebody on the assembly line forgot to tighten a nut. The 2025-2026 Chevrolet Express and GMC Savana — twins that haven’t seen a clean-sheet redesign since the year “Macarena” was on the radio — are headed back to dealers because their steering gear might be coming loose. And loose steering is exactly the sort of thing you don’t want in a fully loaded work van.
All told, GM is calling back 26,541 vans under NHTSA Recall No. 26V399. The culprit, per the paperwork, is a loose nut inside the steering gear assembly. A part sensor at a supplier’s plant reportedly went haywire and waved through assemblies that never got properly torqued down. Translation: a robot fell asleep at its job, and now thousands of vans need a second look.
If your Express or Savana is one of the unlucky ones, you might notice the steering feeling vague and imprecise, or the wheel sitting off-center when you’re trying to drive in a straight line. In the worst case, GM warns it could lead to a loss of steering control and a higher crash risk. Not great when the whole point of these vans is hauling plumbers, florists and Amazon packages around town all day.
The Breakdown By Model Year
The recall splits fairly evenly across the two badges and two model years. On the Chevy side, there are 14,615 units of the 2025 Express built between January 21 and December 12, 2025, plus 6,389 units of the 2026 Express built between September 30, 2025, and June 1, 2026. GMC’s Savana takes a smaller hit with 4,786 units of the 2025 model built between January 21 and October 29, 2025, and just 751 examples of the 2026 Savana built between October 21, 2025, and June 1, 2026. GM estimates only about 1% of those vans actually have the defect, but when steering is involved, you check all of them anyway.
So far, GM says it isn’t aware of any crashes or injuries tied to the loose nut, though it has logged nine field reports that could be related. Owners will be told to bring their vans in so a dealer can inspect the steering gear and, if it’s one of the bad ones, swap the assembly entirely.
Old Bones, New Problems
Here’s the part that makes this recall fun rather than just routine. Neither the Express nor the Savana has been fully redesigned since 1996, which makes them the geriatrics of GM’s showroom. But the company keeps building them for a reason: fleet buyers don’t care about touchscreens or ambient lighting. They want a box on wheels that starts every morning and runs forever, and the Express and Savana have spent three decades doing exactly that. GM is reportedly carrying both vans over into the 2027 model year, pushing this platform past 30 years without a real overhaul.
That’s what makes this one interesting: it isn’t a story about ancient engineering finally giving out. It’s a modern, supplier-side quality-control hiccup that happened to land on GM’s most old-school product. The design that’s survived since the Clinton administration is fine. It’s the 2020s factory automation that dropped the ball.
GM will start mailing owner notifications on August 10, 2026. There’s no reimbursement program this time, but only because the affected vans are all still under warranty, so the fix won’t cost owners anything out of pocket.
It’s been a rough stretch for GM’s recall desk lately. The General is already dealing with regulators reexamining its 6.2L V8 after engine failures kept showing up following recall repairs, and it just killed off Chevy’s biggest Silverado trucks as sales cratered. Toyota is in the same boat with its Tundra V6 recall, Ford is recalling a quarter-million Focus models it can’t prove it ever fixed, and Honda is calling back 880,000 vehicles over suspensions that might literally rust off. The loose-nut van recall is mild by comparison, but if you run a fleet of Expresses or Savanas, you’ll still want to get that letter in August read.