2011 Lincoln Navigator: what breaks, and at what mileage

What owners report breaking

Owners have reported 7 named failure modes on the 2011 Lincoln Navigator, and the three most-reported carry 50% of everything filed.

Brake line, hose or caliper failure leads with 2 reports and about 0.0 per 1,000 vehicles.

Other electrical problem follows with 2 reports, median 5,000 miles.

Control module (ECM/PCM/BCM) failure follows with 1 report, median 85,000 miles.

By system, the reports fall mostly into electrical (3), brakes (2) and adas (2).

What happens when these parts fail

Across the named modes, 1 mentions a crash. Those are the words owners used in their own complaints, and NHTSA does not verify them, but they are the closest thing in this data to a measure of what a failure actually did.

The average severity weight across every report on this year is 4.50, where a stalled engine or a failed airbag weighs many times more than a rattling trim panel, and a figure this high means the reports are dominated by failures with safety consequences rather than annoyances. 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: brake line, hose or caliper failure at $250–$1,600, other electrical problem at $250–$2,000, control module (ECM/PCM/BCM) failure at $700–$3,000 and lane keep or steering assist fault at $200–$1,600. Dealer labour, a seized bolt or a part that is no longer made can push any of these past the top of its range.

10% of the reports on this year sit in the engine, transmission, drivetrain or cooling systems — the four where a repair bill is usually four figures.

How often, against how many were built

Scaled by an estimate of how many of these cars exist, the 2011 Lincoln Navigator draws about 0.2 per 1,000 vehicles, which puts it in the 74th percentile of complaint rates among 2011 vehicles we can rate.

That denominator is the weakest number on the page and it is fair to say so plainly. This year had no usable recall paperwork, so the fleet-size estimate is the median of other years of the same model.

The working figure is 57,015 vehicles. If the true number is twice that, every rate on this page is half what it says; the ranking against other 2011 vehicles, which is what the risk score uses, is far more robust than the rate itself.

Where 2011 sits in the model line

Across the 25 model years of this car that carry enough reports to score, 2008 comes out best at 59 and 2019 worst at 74.

Within the 2010–2017 generation specifically, 2014 is the strongest year at 60 and 2012 the weakest at 68.

What this page cannot tell you

10 owner reports; fleet size borrowed from other years of the same model. 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 10 reports, 7 carried an odometer reading, so the mileages here describe 70% 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".

Named failure modes come from matching phrases in the complaint text, so a badly worded complaint can land in the wrong bucket. The effect washes out across hundreds of reports and does not wash out across five.

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.