"You can feel it's soft right here," Jeff Talman told KSHB.
"Right under his driver and passenger seats, the floorboards were rusting from the inside out," a KSHB reporter said.
"This is a seven-inch area where it's actually rotted up here," Talman said.
That was Jeff Talman, just one of many who have had issues with rusting floorboards in Nissan Altimas.
KSHB reported the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has received more than 400 complains about rust issues in 2002-2006 models.
NBC highlighted a Chicago woman's 2005 car, which had rusted so much the floorboards were actually crumbling.
"The hole was big enough to fit her foot through," NBC reporter Tom Costello said.
"I'm not Fred Flintstone. This is not a good thing," Marie DeMaria said.
While NBC reports snow and road salt could account for rust damage in some vehicles, that's probably not the cause in places that don't get snow and ice. And complaints are coming in from all over the country.
Both Toyota and Ford have recalled hundreds of thousands of vehicles in the past few years because rusting underbody parts made the vehicles fall apart.
Despite the number of complaints, Nissan isn't recalling the Altima vehicle models in question.
"It's not a safety recall problem that's going to cause immediate death and injury if you have a hole in the floor. As a result of that, what we've seen is that Nissan has been able to get away with this problem," auto safety expert Sean Kane told WBZ-TV.
KSHB reports the age of the cars is another way Nissan is able to avoid covering cost to fix them.
"Once it's out of the warranty period, obviously they don't have any legal obligation. It becomes more of a customer service issue of whether they want to deal with it or not," body shop owner Bill Eveland said.
NBC did reach out to Nissan for comment, but the carmaker reiterated that both it and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration do not consider the rust problem to be a safety defect.
Courtesy of Auto Blog.com
