Jaguar Land Rover has told regulators on three continents that a defective module inside the high-voltage battery pack of its Defender plug-in hybrid can overheat and, in extreme cases, start a fire at the back of the vehicle. China’s market regulator opened the newest public filing on Sept. 24, 2026, covering three vehicles, while parallel notices already sat with the United Kingdom’s DVSA, Germany’s KBA and France’s product-safety database, spreading the same defect across four countries and four separate plug-in hybrid nameplates built on the shared Defender platform.
No recall has reached the United States. Jaguar Land Rover has not filed a matching campaign with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, leaving a gap between four active foreign orders and zero domestic ones.
A defective HV battery module and a rear-mounted fire risk
The fault sits inside the high-voltage battery pack itself rather than in the charging system or software layered on top of it. Jaguar Land Rover’s own filing with France’s product-safety register, Rappel Conso, describes the root cause in blunt terms: “a defective module was installed in the high-voltage battery” that can trigger overheating inside the pack. Autoevolution’s compiled report on the four filings goes further, citing thermal overload that in extreme cases produces smoke and fire specifically at the rear of the vehicle, where the pack sits low behind the rear axle, tucked beneath the load floor rather than under the hood.
Jaguar Land Rover’s remedy is uniform across every market that has opened a case: complete replacement of the high-voltage battery pack, done at no charge to the owner. Regulators in each country have ordered notification by registered mail rather than an ordinary recall postcard, a step usually reserved for defects carrying a real fire risk rather than a routine mechanical fix.
Four countries, four filings, one shared component
The paper trail runs oldest to newest through the year. France’s Safety Gate notice, reference SR/01970/26, covers vehicles built between July 7, 2020, and May 1, 2025, and names four plug-in hybrid nameplates at once: Defender, Discovery Sport, Range Rover Evoque and Range Rover Velar. Germany’s Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt opened its own campaign, 16702R, on Sept. 1, 2026, an inspection-and-conditional-replacement order for vehicles built in the same window, while the UK’s Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency logged 58 Defenders under reference R/2025/553.
China’s filing is the smallest and most recent, covering three vehicles from the 2022 model year built between May 25 and July 1, 2021, under campaign S2026M0120V. The narrow Chinese count next to Germany and France’s broader, multi-model filings points toward a defect traced to a specific production run or supplier batch of battery modules rather than a design flaw touching the entire plug-in hybrid Defender lineup end to end.
Jaguar Land Rover has not published a global tally combining the four filings into a single worldwide total, and none of the four regulators’ notices attempts one either. Each government register instead confines its published count to vehicles within its own jurisdiction, which is why the only verified figures so far are the UK’s 58 and China’s three.
The same battery Jaguar Land Rover once called its off-road breakthrough
The pack now under recall is the one Jaguar Land Rover introduced to fanfare in 2020, when it added plug-in hybrid power to the Defender line under the P400e badge, pairing a 19.2-kilowatt-hour battery with a 105-kilowatt electric motor for roughly 27 miles of electric-only range. Iain Gray, the automaker’s senior manager of powertrain advanced engineering, said at launch that “the advanced new P400e Plug-In Hybrid perfectly balances performance with fuel economy and all-electric off-road capability.”
Six years later, the module inside that same pack is the subject of a fire-risk recall rather than a performance pitch, and Jaguar Land Rover has said nothing publicly to update Gray’s framing of the battery since the recall filings began surfacing.
Why no U.S. campaign has surfaced yet
NHTSA’s public recall database returns no campaign for Jaguar Land Rover’s Defender tied to a high-voltage battery fire risk as of this writing, and the agency’s own VIN-based lookup tool is the fastest way for an owner to confirm that directly rather than relying on overseas news coverage. A U.S. filing could still follow. Automakers sometimes stagger recalls by market when a defect traces to a component batch installed only in vehicles built for particular regions, and NHTSA can also open its own investigation independent of a manufacturer’s timeline once foreign safety filings become public, a pattern the agency tracks under its broader Battery Safety Initiative for lithium-ion fire risk across manufacturers.
For now, the gap leaves the practical burden on individual owners to watch for a notice that, on the current record, has not yet been written.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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