2021 FORD EXPLORER — Complaint #2096568
Open-data reference.
NHTSA Complaint about Other/I am not sure filed June 1, 2025
NHTSA complaint #2096568 (ODI reference 11664184) concerns a 2021 FORD EXPLORER and was filed on June 1, 2025. The owner reports the failure occurred on September 13, 2023. The report was geocoded to Ohio based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as other/i am not sure, 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: 0, 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. Because a VIN was supplied, this complaint is tied to a specific vehicle and not just a model-year cohort.
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 FORD EXPLORER cohort independently describe similar other/i am not sure 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 2021 FORD EXPLORER shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.
Complaint Description
We bought this in 2022 from clek, and a few months before we were transferring our daughter from the infant seat to a convertible seat, our infant seat became stuck on the base. Absolutely impossible to get off and my husband and I both tried many times. I reached out to Clek because I was very concerned that in an emergency situation it would take much longer to unstrap and get baby out instead of just grabbing the seat and going. I mean in a car fire, if we went in any body of water- anything itâs extremely concerning to me that this could happen. I have bought cheaper car seats than this for our other children and never once had this issue. They ended up emailing me with a video showing me to break the base, pull a strap and remove the seat from the base - thatâs great besides it still wonât detach and you could never do this in an emergency. They also said this happens often which clearly it does if they have a video showing how to remove it. The car seat has been inspected b
Complaint Details
| NHTSA Complaint ID | 2096568 |
| ODI Number | 11664184 |
| Date Filed | June 1, 2025 |
| Failure Date | September 13, 2023 |
| VIN | 1FMSK8DH0MG |
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.