NHTSA Complaint #11694018 — 2024 MAZDA CX-90

The steering rack catastrophically failed at highway speeds with no warning or signals from from the car that anything was wrong. I was driving on a curvy highway at 60mph when the steering started to feel a bit weird when turning to the left. At first it felt like irregularities in the road surface or something of that nature. A few moments later, it was clear that something was completely broken as the car would turn to the right completely normally, but had a wildly different amount of feeling and effort required to turn left at highway speeds. When taking a left curve at highway speeds, the steering inconsistently switched from taking several times more effort to turn the wheel (feeling as if components were grinding together) to being lighter than normal, oscillating back and forth between these feelings randomly. I distinctly remember that recall 6524A and the associated stop sale was for "2024 Mazda CX-90 vehicles that have a sudden increase in steering effort while driving" due to "A worm gear in the steering gear assembly may have excessive friction, leading to a sudden increase in the effort required to turn the steering wheel while driving" which said that "This sudden change in steering effort could increase the risk of a crash". I'm suspicious that the failure that I experienced is related to this original issue despite the recall being "resolved" for my 2024 CX-90. I can say with certainty that I'm lucky that I did not crash due to the issue. I'm extremely concerned that this failure poses an imminent safety risk for drivers in other CX-90s. I'm also concerned that Mazda created a new steering rack for later model years unaffected by recall 6524A and provided an ineffective fix to the original problem.