Toyota recently expanded the new Tundra’s V6 engine recall, but there’s a caveat for later-model owners.
Since its initial launch, there’s been concern and frustration around the new 3.4-liter twin-turbo V6 in the Toyota Tundra. The saga continued last month, as Toyota recalled nearly 44,000 more trucks to address a manufacturing defect, bringing the total number to around 270,000 units globally. The automaker’s statement in May didn’t include a remedy for the latest batch of trucks, but folks assumed that it would follow a similar procedure to the earlier units by replacing defective engines. That is not the case, as Toyota told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in an updated recall report published on June 15.
The remedy program will go like this: “All known owners of the subject vehicles (43,566 Tundras built between February 7, 2024 and August 5, 2024 in this case) will be notified to return their vehicles to a Toyota and Lexus dealer. Using an inspection software, dealers will evaluate the #1 main bearing and collect available vehicle drive data to confirm the condition of that bearing. If the inspection software cannot confirm that the bearing will be free from abnormal wear due to this issue, dealers will replace the engine. The remedy will be provided free of charge.”
You probably didn’t miss the key point in that statement, but here’s a quick summary anyway: If you own a more recent 2024 Toyota Tundra, you may not get a new engine as a point of order.
The automaker is using a software-based approach instead, although these units ostensibly have the same issue as two earlier recalls prior to the latest campaign last month: one in May 2024 and another in November 2025.
Now, in another letter, Toyota explained the chronology of its latest recall. In early May 2026, it concluded its analysis of #1 main bearings from engine teardowns from trucks built after it implemented improvements to the bearings in July 2024. “Toyota investigated the effects of one of these changes, a cam housing clearance change, on bearing pressure and, together with the supplier, also studied the progression of bearing wear from engines in the field. To do this, both non-failed engines and engines with allged #1 main bearing failure were collected, town down, and had the bearing sent to the supplier for analysis.”
In February, the automaker goes on to say it did find “a stack up of bearing pressure based on variables that included timing chain tension and engine loading scenarios, but this pressure stack up could not differentiate those engines producted during the period under study from the engines previously recalled [in 2024 and 2025].” Toyota ultimately determined through bench testing on the #1 bearings that those components produced during the latest recall matched those in the two previous campaigns.
“Based on the results of the above investigation, Toyota determined that, during a specific production period after the 24V-381 and 25V-767 recalls but before implementation of a certain improvement to the #1 main bearing, there is a possibility that engine machining debris of a particular size and amount may not have been cleared from the engine during manufacturing and can cause [bearing failure] to occur.”
Toyota’s fix may keep brand-new owners in the clear…but for some, the damage is already done.
While Tundra sales took a slight hit in 2025, hundreds of thousands of customers still gave Toyota’s full-size truck a chance, even as the engine recall saga began to take hold. As the situation stands right now, Toyota has replaced more than 70,000 V6 engines, and many of those came after a long wait as dealers and owners alike faced massive backlogs to complete repairs.
This new software fix to inspect newer engines, per a report from The Drive, looks at the resonant frequency of the crankshaft to assess the condition of the #1 main bearing, in conjunction with data from the engine’s onboard computer. That way, technicians don’t have to tear down the engine, and Toyota says it will replace engines if there isn’t enough data to conclusively say whether the bearing is still in good condition.
Still, that leaves plenty of vagueness on what threshold there is on whether the inspector is “confident” the bearing won’t fail, and how that might change from dealer to dealer (even with Toyota’s instruction on the matter). It also continues to sidestep the issue of what lead to the failure in the first place, why it took as long as it did to ostensibly correct it in production, and why some owners may be left with niggling doubt even after a “clean” inspection that their suspect engine could fail at some point down the line. And owners across groups on social media and forums are calling that out, as well as the inconsistent communication on the issue along the way.
All in all, owners in the recall crosshairs are understandably frustrated with this years-long saga. In an age when more and more vehicle defects are “fixed” through software, seeing that against folks who have gotten replacement engines for an acknowledged manufacturing issue is little, if any, peace of mind. Today’s Tundras do ship with an improved main bearing #1 to help guard against the debris Toyota is blaming for earlier engine failures. The idea there is that, even if there is debris, it at least won’t cascade into bearing failure and a destroyed engine.
As there have now been three recalls concerning this engine, however, the question is whether even these new engines may also fail. And even if they hopefully don’t (perhaps especially if they don’t), why some owners may feel stuck between a rock and a hard place between engines that definitively failed, and a fixed engine that almost certainly won’t fail. They will still have the lurking cloud of a bearing issue, even if Toyota’s rigorously developed software and an inspector gives that engine a clean bill of health…rather than just replacing the engine completely to address the concern once and for all.
For those owners, the damage may already be done. At any rate, the ongoing recall campaigns have put a noticeable dent in Toyota’s reputation for durability and reliability, particularly with its trucks.
