NHTSA Complaint #11472778 — 2019 NISSAN ALTIMA

My fiancé and I were driving late at night on a straight, one lane road going just over 40 mph with NOTHING in front of us. For no reason the pre-collision front sensor went off indicating we had the potential of hitting the vehicle in front of us even though there was nothing there. Moments later the dashboard went white showing a red triangle and the automatic braking system came on engaging all the brakes and abruptly reducing the vehicle's speed to approximately 15mph before it disengaged. That this time we had no control over the speed of the vehicle and could only steer the car to the side of the road. Had another vehicle been behind us there would have been an awful accident where us and the driver behind us would have been injured as there is no way anyone could have anticipated such an inappropriate speed change at that time. I brought the vehicle into the dealership days later. They could not duplicate my concern. They found past trouble codes of C1A16 & C1A17 on the vehicle's history. They recommended calibrating the distance sensor and road tests but were not confident this would fix the problem and stated a new sensor may need to be purchased. Upon experiencing this traumatic event in my Nissan vehicle I posted my experience on Facebook and had 3 people I personally know reach out to me saying they experienced similar events in their Nissan. All the people had 2017 or newer Nissans vehicles that included the Sentra and Rogue models. No warning lamps, messages or other symptoms of the problem appeared prior to the failure besides the pre-collision sensor incorrectly coming on as described above. The vehicle is available for inspection upon request.