Owners of more than one million recent-model Jeep Wranglers and Gladiators face an unusual and alarming instruction from federal safety regulators: park outside and away from any building. FCA US, the Stellantis subsidiary that manufactures the vehicles, is recalling 1,076,999 model-year 2021 through 2025 Jeep Wranglers and Jeep Gladiators because an electrical defect can start a fire even when the ignition is off. The same defect has triggered a parallel recall campaign in Australia, raising questions about how quickly repairs can reach owners across two continents while their vehicles sit with a known fire hazard.
Why a million Jeeps parked near homes and garages are now a fire risk
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration did not mince words. The agency directed consumers to keep affected Wranglers and Gladiators outdoors and away from structures until the recall repair is completed. That guidance exists because NHTSA has confirmed it is aware of fires and injury incidents involving the recalled vehicles. A fire that starts while a vehicle is parked in a garage or carport can spread to a home before anyone notices, which explains why regulators took the unusual step of issuing an explicit “park outside” warning rather than simply announcing the recall.
The core problem traces to an electrical connection within the electric hydraulic power steering pump, referred to by its abbreviation EHPSP. That connection can develop high resistance over time, causing it to overheat. Because the fault sits in the electrical system rather than the engine, the vehicle does not need to be running for the defect to produce dangerous heat. An owner who parks a Wrangler in a garage overnight could wake up to a fire that began hours after the key was removed.
The scope of the recall is significant. At 1,076,999 vehicles in the United States alone, it covers five model years of two of Jeep’s most popular nameplates. The Wrangler has consistently ranked among the best-selling SUVs in its segment, and the Gladiator is the brand’s only pickup truck. Many of these vehicles are used for daily commuting, not just off-road recreation, which means the affected population is spread across suburban driveways and apartment parking structures nationwide.
For households, the risk is not limited to property damage. A fire that starts under the hood of a parked vehicle can quickly compromise attached garages and living spaces, potentially trapping occupants inside. Because the defect can trigger a fire without any driver input, owners cannot reduce the risk through careful driving or maintenance habits. The only meaningful mitigation until the repair is performed is to keep the vehicle physically separated from buildings and other vehicles.
Parallel recalls in the U.S. and Australia confirm a global electrical defect
The recall is not limited to North America. In Australia, Stellantis (Australia and New Zealand) Pty Ltd filed recall documentation covering 2020 through 2024 Jeep JL Wranglers and JT Gladiators under the same campaign designation, 21D. The Australian recall notice describes the identical defect: an EHPSP electrical connection susceptible to high resistance and overheating. The fact that both a U.S. federal agency and an Australian regulator identified the same root cause in overlapping model years removes any ambiguity about whether this is an isolated manufacturing batch issue. It is a design-level problem that affects vehicles built across multiple production years on two continents.
The dual-market recall also raises a practical concern about repair timing. Stellantis must source replacement parts, train dealership technicians, and schedule appointments for well over a million vehicles globally. Owner notification letters typically go out weeks before parts are available at dealerships. During that gap, owners know their vehicle is defective but cannot yet get it fixed. The “park outside” guidance is essentially an interim safety measure for a period that could stretch for months, depending on how quickly Stellantis can ramp up parts production and distribution.
For owners who live in apartment complexes, condominiums, or urban areas without private driveways, the instruction to park away from structures is not simple to follow. A vehicle that cannot safely sit in a parking garage presents a real logistical problem, and neither NHTSA nor Stellantis has publicly addressed how those owners should manage the gap between notification and repair. Some may have little choice but to continue using shared garages, accepting a risk that regulators have explicitly warned against.
Unanswered questions about the Wrangler and Gladiator fire timeline
Several pieces of information that owners need have not yet been made public through available recall documentation. The exact number of fire incidents and injuries that prompted the recall has not been specified in the NHTSA press release. The agency confirmed awareness of fires and injuries but did not provide a count, which makes it difficult for owners to assess how common the failures are relative to the size of the recalled population. Whether fires have occurred in dozens of vehicles or hundreds carries different weight for someone deciding how urgently to act.
The chronology of Stellantis’s internal investigation is also unclear from public materials. Owners do not know when the company first received field reports of fires, how long it took to identify the EHPSP connection as the root cause, or what interim steps, if any, were taken while engineers worked toward a remedy. That lack of transparency may fuel frustration, especially among drivers who continued to park in attached garages before the “park outside” warning was issued.
The specific repair procedure and the parts required for campaign 21D have not been detailed in publicly available documents from either the U.S. or Australian recall filings. Owners do not yet know whether the fix involves replacing the entire EHPSP unit, modifying the electrical connector, re-routing wiring, or adding a protective circuit. The complexity of the repair will directly determine how long each dealership visit takes and how quickly the backlog of over a million vehicles can be cleared. A simple connector swap could be handled in a brief appointment; a more involved steering system replacement could tie up service bays and lengthen wait times.
Stellantis has not publicly confirmed whether the same EHPSP electrical connection appears in other vehicle lines or model years beyond the Wrangler and Gladiator. If the component is shared with other Stellantis products, the recall could expand as additional investigations unfold. Conversely, if the steering system is unique to these models, that would limit the recall’s footprint but still leave a large number of off-road–oriented vehicles with a serious on-road and at-home safety risk.
What owners can do while waiting for a fix
For now, the most important step for affected owners is to follow the park-outside guidance as closely as their living situation allows. Parking in open-air lots, on the street away from buildings, or in detached structures can reduce the chance that a vehicle fire will spread to a home or apartment. Owners should also watch for official recall notices by mail and monitor automaker communications for details on when parts will be available.
Scheduling a repair appointment promptly once dealers are equipped to perform the fix will be critical. With more than a million vehicles in the queue, early callers are likely to secure earlier service dates. Owners should be prepared to ask their dealer how long the repair is expected to take, whether loaner vehicles are available, and what signs of trouble-such as burning smells or smoke from the engine bay-should trigger an immediate stop-drive decision rather than waiting for a scheduled appointment.
Until Stellantis and regulators release fuller data on incident counts, repair procedures, and any potential component sharing with other models, Wrangler and Gladiator owners are left balancing inconvenience against safety. The scale of the recall and the unusual instruction to park outside underscore that this is not a minor defect. Treating the risk seriously, even in the absence of exhaustive public detail, is the safest course while the long process of recalling and repairing more than a million Jeeps plays out.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
