2005 IC FE: what breaks, and at what mileage

What owners report breaking

Owners have reported 2 named failure modes on the 2005 IC FE, and the three most-reported carry 100% of everything filed, so the trouble here is concentrated rather than scattered.

Headlight failure or clouding leads with 8 reports and about 0.3 per 1,000 vehicles.

Parking brake failure follows with 1 report.

By system, the reports fall mostly into lighting (8) and brakes (1).

How bad it is when it goes

Nothing in the reports on the 2005 IC FE mentions a crash, a fire or an injury. That is the ordinary case and it is worth stating: most defect complaints are about a car that stopped working, not one that hurt somebody.

The average severity weight across every report on this year is 2.00, where a stalled engine or a failed airbag weighs many times more than a rattling trim panel. The weighting is set out in full on the methodology page.

What the top failures cost to put right, as editorial estimates for an independent US shop rather than figures from NHTSA: headlight failure or clouding at $150–$1,800 and parking brake failure at $250–$1,300. Dealer labour, a seized bolt or a part that is no longer made can push any of these past the top of its range.

How often, against how many were built

Scaled by an estimate of how many of these cars exist, the 2005 IC FE draws about 0.4 per 1,000 vehicles, which puts it in the 66th percentile of complaint rates among 2005 vehicles we can rate.

That denominator is the weakest number on the page and it is fair to say so plainly. Rate per 1,000 uses a fleet-size estimate derived from recall paperwork for this exact model year. It is a lower bound.

The working figure is 25,000 vehicles. If the true number is twice that, every rate on this page is half what it says; the ranking against other 2005 vehicles, which is what the risk score uses, is far more robust than the rate itself.

Recalls on the 2005 model year

NHTSA has issued 5 recall campaigns covering the 2005 IC FE, affecting an estimated 25,598 vehicles. A recall is a different kind of evidence from a complaint: it is the regulator and the manufacturer agreeing that something has to be fixed, and the fix is free for as long as the car exists.

The campaigns cover structure:body:hood, child seat:latch strap, engine and engine cooling and equipment adaptive/mobility. Whether the work was actually done on the car in front of you is a question only the VIN can answer, and the manufacturer or NHTSA will answer it free.

One caution about reading these together: a recall usually raises the complaint count for the same part, because owners who read about it go and file. The mileages stay informative; the counts get noisy.

The limits of complaint data

9 owner reports; fleet size estimated from this year's own recall paperwork. Every count on this page is therefore a floor: it is the number of owners who went to the trouble of filing with a federal agency, which is a small and self-selected fraction of the owners who had the fault.

Of those 9 reports, 0 carried an odometer reading, so the mileages here describe 0% of the sample rather than all of it. Owners also round: readings pile up on multiples of ten thousand, which is why this site publishes "about 90,000 miles" and not "91,438".

The failure modes are assigned by software reading the owner's own words, which is accurate in bulk and wrong in individual cases. A mode with a handful of reports may contain a misfiled one.

And nothing here predicts what one car will do. These are other people's complaints, filed years apart, on cars maintained by strangers. Read the page as a map of where this model year has previously gone wrong, then have the specific car in front of you inspected.