Ford Explorer Complaints by Year

Explorer is kept apart from the Expedition. Open the year you are buying for recalls and owner filings.

NHTSA complaint counts are self-selected reports. They are not normalised for sales volume and they are not a reliability score. YearTell does not publish stars, “best year” lists or advice to avoid a vehicle.

This guide reports NHTSA owner-complaint and recall counts for the Ford Explorer from the 2026-09-07 snapshot. 31,849 owner reports are on file across 33 published model years (1991–2025). 2002 has the highest complaint count (3,234).

Older model years have had longer to accumulate reports, so a high lifetime total is not evidence that a year is worse to own. YearTell does not adjust these figures for how many vehicles were sold.

Where a system dominates the file, it is named below as a count, not as a diagnosis. Open the year-page for the component table, the recall list and a short set of owner narratives.

Years that appear most often in NHTSA complaints

Recall campaigns are manufacturer safety actions filed with NHTSA. A year can have many complaints and few recalls, or the reverse. The two series answer different questions.

If you are comparing two adjacent years, use the equal-exposure comparison when one exists. That window holds age constant so the later year is not punished for having had less time on the road.

A practical read: open the year you are shopping, note the system named most often, read every recall campaign, then skim the owner filings for that system. Take that list to a mechanic. Do not turn the complaint total into a score.

Model-year records cited

• 2002 Ford Explorer
• 2016 Ford Explorer
• 2013 Ford Explorer
• 2015 Ford Explorer
• 2014 Ford Explorer
• 2017 Ford Explorer
• 1998 Ford Explorer
• 1997 Ford Explorer
• Ford Explorer

How YearTell builds these numbers

Counts are not a reliability score.