Ford's luxury Lincoln brand may be experiencing a product and design renaissance with new market entries like the just revealed Aviator, but already there's a serious recall that's just been issued for its other major 2019 crossover launch, the Nautilus. According to the automaker, a total of 2,700 2019 model year Nautilus crossovers are being recalled because of faulty steering control technology that could lead to a crash. Fortunately, there haven't been any reports of injuries or fatalities.

But this recall is actually a bit embarrassing for Lincoln because the Nautilus, which starts at around $40,000, is equipped with a lot of premium safety suite and driver assist technologies.

For example, it comes equipped with lane-centering assist and adaptive front steering, two highly desirable features today. However, the affected vehicles may not properly detect whether the driver has their hands off the steering wheel. If that system fails, the vehicle may not alert the driver to place their hands back on the wheel in the event of an emergency or any other traffic-related situation. This can obviously lead to increased crash risk, hence the recall. In the US, 2,276 vehicles are affected and another 371 in Canada, all of which were built from September 5 to November 19. Fortunately, the fix is very simple.

It will require dealerships to update the steering control module software. However, this isn't the first 2019 Nautilus recall. Just last November, another 271 units were recalled in order to replace the driver airbag modules because they may have improperly injection-molded plastic covers that could potentially separate during deployment.

Hopefully, Lincoln will quickly sort out these Nautilus control quality production issues and, equally important, apply those lessons to its current and upcoming lineup. It's not good to issue recalls like these on all-new and just on sale models.