Engine bay fire on the 1997 Ford Explorer
3 fires 3 of the 3 reports for this failure mention a crash, a fire, an injury or a death. Those are the owner's words on the complaint form, not a verified finding, and one report can mention more than one.
Only 0 reports for this mode came with an odometer reading, which is too few for percentiles to mean anything. The page is here because someone linked to it; treat the figures as anecdotes, and see the full report for this year instead.
When engine bay fire gets reported
There are 3 reports of engine bay fire on the 1997 Ford Explorer. That is too few to place the failure on the odometer with any confidence.
It is the 54th most-reported problem on this model year.
None of these reports included an odometer reading, so there is no mileage distribution to show. NHTSA's form does not require the field.
What happens, and what it costs
Of these reports, 3 a fire is mentioned. Owners write their own complaints and the agency does not verify them, so read this as what the reports say happened rather than as a confirmed count.
Putting it right typically runs $4,000–$20,000 at an independent US shop. That range is an editorial estimate held in this site's failure-mode catalogue, not a figure from NHTSA, and it is a repair cost rather than a diagnosis cost.
This mode is classified as critical, which means a failure can leave the car unable to stop, steer, or stay out of the way of traffic. It is weighted accordingly in the risk score.
The same failure on other years
The same failure is reported on 3 model years of this car. It shows up earliest on the 2000, at a median of 75,000 miles, and latest on the 1996 at 150,000 miles.
By volume the 1998 carries the most reports, with 8; the 1997 has 0. A mode that appears across most years of a model is usually a design choice rather than a bad batch.
If one year stands out to the left, that is the year to avoid; if the whole line sits at a similar mileage, this is wear rather than a defect in one production run.
Tick median reported mileage Solid middle half of reports Faint 10th to 90th percentile Colour how bad the failure is when it happens
Also reported on the 1997 Ford Explorer
Other wheel or tire problem
Other speed control problem
Tire blowout or tread separation
Other body or interior problem
Other engine problem
Seat belt or retractor failure
How far this goes
This page is kept out of search results because 3 reports is not enough to publish percentiles from. It stays reachable because somebody looking at this exact car would rather see the reports than be told there are none.
Complaints are voluntary, so 3 is a floor and not a count of affected cars. Mileages are typed in by owners and cluster on round numbers. And the mode itself is assigned by software reading the complaint text, which is reliable in bulk and fallible one report at a time.
What this is and is not. These are the mileages at which owners chose to complain to a federal agency, which is not the same as the mileage at which the part fails on every car. It skews toward failures that happened outside warranty, cost real money, or frightened someone. It is still the only public dataset that carries failure mileage at all, and the shape of a few hundred readings is informative even when a single one is not. Methodology · JSON · this failure on other cars
Source Owner complaints and recall records published by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, model years 1996–2027 Figures rebuilt Published by AtWhatMileage How every figure is computed