Control arm, ball joint or bushing failure on the 1998 Jeep Wrangler
1 crash 1 of the 10 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 control arm, ball joint or bushing failure gets reported
There are 10 reports of control arm, ball joint or bushing failure on the 1998 Jeep Wrangler, 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 108,000 miles. It is the 14th most-reported problem on this model year.
The whole distribution
| 10th | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | 107,000 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 crash 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 $400–$2,200 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.
The same failure on other years
The same failure is reported on 23 model years of this car. It shows up earliest on the 2017, at a median of 30 miles, and latest on the 2002 at 150,000 miles.
By volume the 2018 carries the most reports, with 26; the 1998 has 10. 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.
This is now the 3rd sway bar end-link I've replaced on my jeep, and the 2nd I've replaced on my friend's 97 jeep wrangler. I asked my mechanic about this and he told me he gets this problem all the time. How can such wide spread failure of an important saftey item like the swaybar end link escape being part of a recall. My jeep has failed the pennsylvania safety inspection for two years now because of this problem. In the fall of 2002 while making an sudden evasive manuver, my jeep handled the situation so poorly that I ended up crashing the vehicle. I found, during repair, that the swaybar end-link was not in working order.*ak
Noticed a noise while driving home the other day thought it may have been my exhaust rattling around, so I got under vehicle to inspect the noise, and what I found was that the rear part of the frame has rusted away and the brackets for the rear trailing arms had detached from the frame allowing the arms to drop, and on this particular side the brake lines are attached to this control arm. I know that toyota had a similar recall on the truck frames for rust perforation, and that jeep had one on the liberty for the rear lower control arms rusting and breaking. I am an automotive technician and my personal jeep is not the first one I have seen with this potentially dangerous condition. I also googled this problem and found that its very common in these vehicles as well. *tr
Noticed a noise while driving home the other day thought it may have been my exhaust rattling around, so I got under vehicle to inspect the noise, and what I found was that the rear part of the frame has rusted away and the brackets for the rear trailing arms had detached from the frame allowing the arms to drop, and on this particular side the brake lines are attached to this control arm. I know that toyota had a similar recall on the truck frames for rust perforation, and that jeep had one on the liberty for the rear lower control arms rusting and breaking. I am an automotive technician and my personal jeep is not the first one I have seen with this potentially dangerous condition. I also googled this problem and found that its very common in these vehicles as well. *tr
Also reported on the 1998 Jeep Wrangler
Airbag warning light or occupant sensor fault
Seat belt or retractor failure
Exhaust leak or fumes in the cabin
Instrument cluster or gauge failure
Other electrical problem
Other powertrain problem
How far this goes
This page is kept out of search results because 10 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 10 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 control arm, ball joint or bushing failure happen on the 1998 Jeep Wrangler?
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 control arm, ball joint or bushing failure on the 1998 Jeep Wrangler?
10 reports have been filed with NHTSA, about 3.4 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