NHTSA Complaint #11447547 — 2013 NISSAN ALTIMA

On the morning of Thursday January 13th I pulled in my place of employment which had a small pot hole at the entrance. Upon entering the parking lot I hit that hole and noticed that my car had a bit of a sway, but did not understand what the issue was. After working 8 hours I was going to leave and noticed the same issue with the vehicle. I then exited my car to inspect my tires thinking I had a flat. Upon further inspection I noticed that my fender well was sitting on top of my tire. I then looked under my car to confirm that the lower linkage arm for the passengers rear tire had sheared from the subframe. The car at that time was un-drivable so I called a tow truck to transport it to a Nissan dealership. On January 14th I received my diagnosis report that stated the lower linkage arm had rusted and sheared because of this issue. They also inspected the drivers side part and confirmed the same issue was taking place with the other linkage. The vehicle is only 8 years old at this time and the part has rusted so severely that it caused the part to fail. In my opinion this is a very detrimental issue that Nissan will not acknowledge or offer assistance with fixing. My biggest concern with the whole situation is that I could have been driving the vehicle at 70mph on the highway and have this part fail. Should that have happened I could have been seriously injured or even killed. In my opinion I think that Nissan needs to do an investigation on part corrosion since this is an issue they are combating already with the secondary hood latch, which I have had a representative from Nissan say was because of corrosion of that secondary latch. This does not seem like an isolated issue, but more of a larger concern that Nissan should be looking into with corrosion on very important parts to the vehicles integrity.