NHTSA complaint #345421 (ODI reference 761092) concerns a 1997 FORD EXPLORER and was filed on April 25, 2002. The owner reports the failure occurred on April 21, 2001. The report was geocoded to Pennsylvania based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as child seat:shield assembly, 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 child seat:shield assembly 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 1997 FORD EXPLORER shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.