Ford just told nearly every owner of its current-generation Bronco to bring it in. All of them. Every model year from 2021 through 2026, including the Bronco Raptor.
The reason: wires rubbing themselves bare inside the engine compartment, arcing, and setting fire to whatever’s nearby. The recall covers 565,691 vehicles. Ford has sold 589,860 current-gen Broncos through June, meaning this recall captures roughly 96 percent of every Bronco that has ever rolled off the line.
The root cause is almost embarrassingly basic. A wiring harness on the passenger side of the engine compartment doesn’t have enough abrasion protection. Normal vibration and movement cause the harness to rub against surrounding components until the insulation wears through.
Exposed copper does what exposed copper does — it shorts, it arcs, and it finds something flammable. Ford began its investigation in June after identifying seven Bronco Raptor fires and eight base Bronco fires originating from the passenger-side engine bay. Inspections of more than 80 vehicles turned up rubbing and chafing marks on the harness in a small number of units.
The company says it’s aware of 15 potential incidents tied to the defect, 10 of which are already legal claims. No injuries or accidents have been reported — yet. Warning signs include smoke from air vents or gauge cluster lights flickering before flames appear from the passenger side.
The fix is straightforward: dealers will add convolute sheathing and abrasion tape to the harness, free of charge. Ford expects only about 1 percent of affected vehicles actually have a defect. The recall blankets the entire population because there’s no way to predict which harnesses will wear through first.
This is Ford’s 60th recall of 2025. Sixty. And the year isn’t even eight months old.
The automaker has now recalled over 11 million vehicles since January. Just weeks ago, Ford recalled another 777,000 trucks and SUVs for a separate issue. At some point the volume stops being a series of isolated problems and starts looking like a pattern of manufacturing discipline that isn’t where it needs to be.
Insufficient wire protection on a harness that moves is not a complex engineering failure. It’s a packaging oversight, the kind of thing that gets caught when validation testing is thorough and engineers have time to sweat the details. That it persisted across six model years — surviving multiple production cycles without correction — suggests the issue was either missed entirely or deprioritized until fires started showing up in field data.
The Bronco is one of Ford’s crown jewels, a genuine success story in a lineup that has struggled with quality narratives. It outsells most of its competitors and commands real loyalty. Owners will get the fix and likely move on.
But 60 recalls in seven months erodes something harder to repair than a wiring harness: the assumption that someone at the factory is watching the details before the lawyers and NHTSA have to. Ford says dealer notifications will go out and owners can bring their vehicles in for the repair. Anyone concerned in the meantime should watch for smoke from the vents and dashboard warning lights, which is not the kind of owner experience a $40,000-plus SUV should require.
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