Stellantis has recalled more than a million Jeep Wrangler and Gladiator vehicles after investigators traced a series of fires to a single overlooked connector inside the power steering system. The recall, filed under the FCA US brand in June, carries an unusually blunt instruction from federal safety regulators: park the vehicle outside and away from other cars and structures, because the fire risk exists even when the engine is off.
What makes the case notable is not just its size but how long it took to surface. The defect traces back to a manufacturing tolerance problem that regulators and the automaker spent nearly three years chasing before settling on a cause.
A Connector Built Outside Its Own Tolerances
According to the manufacturer’s own safety recall report filed with regulators, the root cause sits inside the electric hydraulic power steering pump, specifically at the header where the wiring harness plugs into the pump. That header was manufactured outside its specified tolerances, which required more force than intended to snap the connector into place during assembly. The extra insertion force can spread the terminals apart or push a terminal out of position, and either condition can leave the connection only partially seated. A partially seated, high-resistance connection generates heat in the surrounding wiring and combustible materials nearby, and in a subset of vehicles that heat has been enough to start a fire, whether the Jeep is running, parked, or switched off entirely.
Nearly Three Years From First Fire Report to Recall
Stellantis’s own chronology, filed with its recall report, shows the company investigated fires tied to this connection as early as 2023, closed that inquiry when the occurrence rate looked too low to act on, then reopened it in August 2024 after incident reports increased. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened its own formal investigation, designated PE24-024, in September 2024. Over the following year and a half, the company issued three rounds of supplemental data to regulators, attempted repeatedly to reproduce the failure through bench testing, and worked through everything from CT scans to full vehicle buybacks to isolate the mechanism. It was not until April 2026 that engineers confirmed the loose connection could progress to melting and, from there, to a vehicle fire. The company’s Vehicle Regulations Committee did not formally determine a safety defect existed until May 28, 2026, roughly two weeks before the recall was announced.
The Scale: Two Model Lines, Three Model-Year Ranges
The recall spans 1,076,999 vehicles in the United States: 787,887 Jeep Wranglers, including the Wrangler 4xe plug-in hybrid variant, built between June 2020 and December 2024, plus 289,112 Jeep Gladiators built between August 2020 and December 2024, both covering model years 2021 through 2025. In its public alert on the recall, NHTSA said the defect is linked to 51 fires and one injury. The manufacturer’s more granular internal count, submitted in its Part 573 recall filing, cites 72 field reports related to the issue, 35 of which investigators confirmed originated specifically at the power steering connector, alongside 63 customer assistance calls and no confirmed accidents beyond the single reported injury. The gap between those two figures reflects how field reports and customer contacts get filtered down to confirmed root-cause incidents as an investigation matures, not a disagreement about whether the hazard is real.
Why Notification Came Before the Fix
This recall is what the industry calls an advance notice recall: Stellantis told owners a defect existed before a repair was ready to install. Dealers were notified starting June 11, and owner notification letters began mailing July 9 through early August, but the letters themselves functioned as a heads-up rather than a scheduling tool, since the remedy program needed additional lead time to reach dealership parts counters. In the meantime, the park-outside instruction is doing the safety work that a completed repair normally would. It is a stopgap that shifts risk away from occupants and nearby structures without requiring every one of the roughly 1.1 million vehicles to be pulled off the road entirely, since a fire originating at the connector while a vehicle is parked outdoors and away from a garage or another car is far less likely to cause serious harm than the same fire in an enclosed space.
What the Repair Involves Once It Reaches a Dealer
Once a vehicle’s turn comes up, Stellantis dealers inspect the electric hydraulic power steering pump’s electrical connection and repair or replace the wiring harness, the pump itself, or both, depending on what the inspection finds, at no cost to the owner. Owners can confirm whether their specific vehicle is included by checking its vehicle identification number directly with Stellantis or through NHTSA’s public recall search, and the manufacturer’s customer care line and the Mopar recall site both remain open for scheduling questions in the meantime. The size of this single campaign, more than a million vehicles from one automaker over one connector, made it the largest fire-risk recall filed with NHTSA so far in 2026, even in a year that has otherwise produced a heavy volume of separate safety campaigns across the industry, from seat belt pretensioners to rear subframe corrosion.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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