Engine bay fire on the 2004 Ford F-150
1 fire 1 of the 7 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 7 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 7 reports of engine bay fire on the 2004 Ford F-150, 7 with a mileage attached. That is too few to place the failure on the odometer with any confidence.
A part like this is normally expected to survive 95,000 miles. It is the 38th most-reported problem on this model year.
The whole distribution
| 10th | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | 103,645 miles | — | — |
Read the 10th percentile as “one report in ten arrived this early”. Exact figures are shown in this table because it is the table of record; everywhere else on the site they are rounded to the precision the sample can carry.
What a percentile can and cannot tell you here
These five numbers describe the readings owners gave, in order. The median is the middle one: half the reports arrived below it. The 10th and 90th are the edges of the bulk of the distribution, and the distance between them is the part worth reading. A tight spread — say 70,000 to 95,000 miles — points at something that wears out on a schedule, and the schedule is knowable. A wide one, 20,000 to 190,000, points at a fault that hits some cars and never troubles others, which means the mileage on the listing in front of you tells you very little about your odds.
What these figures are not is a survival curve. Every reading here comes from a car whose owner filed a complaint, so the sample contains only failures: it cannot say what share of the fleet made it past 150,000 miles untouched, because those owners had nothing to report. Nor is the mileage the moment of failure — it is the odometer reading as recalled at the time of filing, which may be weeks later and is sometimes rounded to the nearest ten thousand by the person typing it.
Percentiles are shown at all only once 8 readings exist for the vehicle and mode. Below that the middle of a handful of numbers is noise wearing a decimal point, so the figures are withheld rather than dressed up.
What happens, and what it costs
Of these reports, 1 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 10 model years of this car. It shows up earliest on the 2016, at a median of 100 miles, and latest on the 1998 at 145,000 miles.
By volume the 2000 carries the most reports, with 23; the 2004 has 7. 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
What owners wrote
Verbatim from NHTSA complaint narratives, trimmed for length. The mileage is the one the owner gave.
Tl*the contact owns a 2004 ford f150. The vehicle was parked for 1-2 hours and he noticed the fire under the hood. The fire was extinguished. The dealer towed the vehicle to have an investigator diagnose the failure. The investigator concluded that the cause of the fire was the cruise control. The cruise control has not operated normally in over 1 year. Also, the dealer stated that there was a recall on the vehicle. Therefore, they werenot liable for damages. The contact stated that hewas the second owner, and never received a recall notice. The current and failure mileage were 137,000. The contact has pictures of the vehicle. It has not been determined if the vehicle could be repaired. There was no mention of a police or fire report. *ak
Returning from a trip to northeast alabama, my 2004 f-150 4x4 with a 4.6 liter engine, blow the # 2 spark plug out of the engine. I got the truck back to my girlfriends home in northeast ga. And this is where I'm still at. The dealer I called told me that the plug was at fault before I could even finish telling him what had happened and that it would cost me about $2,800.00 to replace the head on that side... I asked him "if it was the plug at fault and you haven't even seen the truck yet, how do you know it's going to take a replacement head and the cost of it"? He put me on hold and after 20 minutes I hung up and called back and no one would talk to me about it..!! Since then, I have researched this and found that not only has it happened to others, but it has happened to alot of others...!! I have also found that this problem has been reported to your agency many times and to date, nothing has been done about it. When this plug blow out of the head, fuel was being pushed out of the head and could have caused a fire under the hood. At speeds on interstates as high as they are, my girlfriend, myself and out 2 dogs could have been…
I was driving on a highway at 55 MPH in my 2004 ford 150 when I heard a loud noise from the engine. Found a spark plug had been completely blown out of the engine. I have done some reading and found this to be a common problem with ford's triton engines. Coil pack was sparking which could have LED to a serious engine fire. Please have ford fix the problem. *tr
Also reported on the 2004 Ford F-150
Other visibility problem
Window regulator or power window failure
Other engine problem
Other powertrain problem
Other body or interior problem
Other suspension problem
How far this goes
This page is kept out of search results because 7 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 7 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.
Questions this page answers
At what mileage does engine bay fire happen on the 2004 Ford F-150?
Across 7 owner reports that included an odometer reading, half were filed by 105,000 miles. A quarter were filed before — and a quarter after —. These are the mileages owners reported when they complained, not a prediction for any individual car.
How common is engine bay fire on the 2004 Ford F-150?
7 reports have been filed with NHTSA, about 0.0 per 1,000 vehicles. Complaints are voluntary, so this is a floor rather than a count of affected cars.
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