2018 HONDA CIVIC — Complaint #1971138
Open-data reference.
NHTSA Complaint about ELECTRICAL SYSTEM:SEAT HEATER:WIRING HARNESS filed February 28, 2024
NHTSA complaint #1971138 (ODI reference 11574489) concerns a 2018 HONDA CIVIC and was filed on February 28, 2024. The owner reports the failure occurred on February 10, 2024. The report was geocoded to New York based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as electrical system:seat heater:wiring harness, one of NHTSA's standardized taxonomy codes used to group defect patterns across make, model, and year.
The filer flagged the following severity indicators: crash: no, fire: no, injuries: 1, fatalities: 0. No crash, fire, or fatality was associated with this report, which places it in the early-warning stream rather than the priority-review stream. No VIN was supplied by the filer, so this complaint contributes to model-year trend data but cannot be tied to a specific vehicle.
Individual complaints are consumer-submitted and unverified by NHTSA engineers — the agency's role at this stage is to collect, index, and make them searchable. What matters for federal action is the pattern: when many owners of the same HONDA CIVIC cohort independently describe similar electrical system:seat heater:wiring harness failures, defect investigators have grounds to open a PE and request manufacturer data. Related filings for the same vehicle and component appear below, and the detail page for the full 2018 HONDA CIVIC shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.
Complaint Description
The contact is an attorney who represented the owner of a 2018 Honda Civic. The contact stated that the client had taken pain medication and fell asleep in the driver's seat with the seat heater activated. The client slept for approximately seven hours and sustained severe burns the his lumbar region. The client was later admitted to the local hospital and treated for third-degree burns. The contact was concerned that the seat heater may have failed and became too hot causing injuries to the client. The vehicle was not yet examined. The manufacturer and local dealer were not contacted. The failure mileage was unknown.
Complaint Details
| NHTSA Complaint ID | 1971138 |
| ODI Number | 11574489 |
| Date Filed | February 28, 2024 |
| Failure Date | February 10, 2024 |
Source: NHTSA Vehicle Complaints Database. Component taxonomy and severity codes are standardized by NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation.
Read our methodology — how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.