NHTSA complaint #242616 (ODI reference 554358) concerns a 1995 FORD EXPLORER and was filed on September 26, 2000. The report was geocoded to California based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as equipment:mechanical:winch, 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. 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 FORD EXPLORER cohort independently describe similar equipment:mechanical:winch 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 1995 FORD EXPLORER shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.