Safety and harm
Which Cars Catch Fire Most Often
Every complaint where the owner reported a fire, counted by model year.
3 min read · 268 figures, all from the federal record · rebuilt 3 hours ago
A fire complaint means the owner told NHTSA the vehicle burned — in the engine bay, the wiring, the battery pack or the fuel system. It is the most serious thing an owner can report short of an injury.
Across the whole file, 55,617 complaints carry a fire. The twenty-five model years below account for 4,209 of them — 7.6% of every one on record.
The 2000 Ford F-150 leads it with 387 fires, out of 1,274 complaints about that model year in total.
The twenty-five
| Vehicle | Fires | All complaints | Share | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C 2000 Ford F-150 | 387 | 1,274 | 30.4% | C |
| F 1997 Ford F-150 | 296 | 3,285 | 9.0% | F |
| C 2001 Ford F-150 | 292 | 1,451 | 20.1% | C |
| F 2000 Ford Expedition | 231 | 1,136 | 20.3% | F |
| D 2011 Hyundai Sonata | 187 | 4,621 | 4.0% | D |
| D 2000 Pontiac Grand Prix | 182 | 588 | 31.0% | D |
| F 2013 KIA Optima | 171 | 1,885 | 9.1% | F |
| D 2000 Ford Focus | 171 | 5,152 | 3.3% | D |
| D 2012 Hyundai Sonata | 165 | 2,280 | 7.2% | D |
| F 2013 Hyundai Sonata | 161 | 2,651 | 6.1% | F |
| D 1999 Pontiac Grand Prix | 150 | 500 | 30.0% | D |
| C 2013 Ford Fusion | 148 | 2,368 | 6.3% | C |
| D 2014 Ford Escape | 148 | 2,662 | 5.6% | D |
| D 2002 Ford Escape | 147 | 1,397 | 10.5% | D |
| D 2012 Jeep Grand Cherokee | 144 | 2,327 | 6.2% | D |
| F 1997 Ford Escort | 133 | 729 | 18.2% | F |
| D 2013 Ford Escape | 130 | 3,681 | 3.5% | D |
| C 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix | 128 | 427 | 30.0% | C |
| C 1995 Ford F-150 | 124 | 788 | 15.7% | C |
| D 1998 Ford Explorer | 124 | 2,374 | 5.2% | D |
| F 1997 Pontiac Grand Prix | 123 | 1,064 | 11.6% | F |
| D 2012 KIA Optima | 120 | 1,263 | 9.5% | D |
| D 2012 KIA Sorento | 117 | 1,208 | 9.7% | D |
| C 2002 Ford F-150 | 115 | 965 | 11.9% | C |
| D 2015 KIA Optima | 115 | 1,400 | 8.2% | D |
By share rather than by count
Re-sorted so the model years where this was the largest proportion of what owners reported come first. A smaller car with a worse ratio tells you more than a best-seller with a bigger number.
Per thousand complaints about that model year.
Source — NHTSA complaint file, 2,151,276 records.
How this was made. Nobody wrote this article and left it to age. It is generated by a query against the complaint database, and rebuilt every time the data is — so the numbers in the sentences above are the numbers as they stand today, not as they stood when somebody last had time to update them. How the grading works.