Total Complaints
1 filings
Ford Bronco · model year
1 NHTSA complaints. A VIN lookup is required to determine whether a specific vehicle has an unrepaired recall.
NHTSA overall rating
Not crash-tested
New Car Assessment Program
The verdict
The 1997 Ford Bronco posts top-1% complaint standing (fewest filings) among its own model-year siblings.
The 1997FordBronco carries 1 consumer safety complaint in NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation database for this specific model-year cohort. Within that volume, owners reported 0 crashes, 0 fires, 0 injuries, and 0 fatalities. No NCAP 5-star crash-test rating is available for this model year in the federal database.
The most frequently selected component label in reports for the 1997 Bronco is fuel system, gasoline:storage:tank assembly with 1 filings. Complaint categories reflect owner reports and intake categorization; they do not establish a defect pattern or cause.
NHTSA currently has 4 investigation files overlapping the 1997 Bronco. Owners comparing this cohort against neighboring years should read the complaint-by-year trend as report volume, not a causal diagnosis. Use the related-complaint feed and the official recall lookup when researching a specific vehicle.
PlainCars' own composite of NHTSA NCAP crash-test ratings and rollover-risk assessment, each dimension normalized against the federal scale or the full national model-year corpus. Not an official NHTSA figure, and not a substitute for a specific vehicle's VIN-level recall check.
Total Complaints
1 filings
Crashes Reported
0 reports
Source
NHTSA ODI
Federal complaints database
At or below the fleet median complaint volume.
| Component | Count |
|---|---|
| FUEL SYSTEM, GASOLINE:STORAGE:TANK ASSEMBLY | 1 |
GAS TANK RUSTED THROUGH A SKID PLATE UNDERNEATH TANK WHERE A PAD FIT BETWEEN TANK & PLATE. WATER OR MOISTURE GETS BETWEEN GAS TANK & SKID PLATE & STAYS THERE, EVENTUALLY RUST OCCURS & GAS LEAKS OUT & DRAINS ON EXHAUST PIPE. *AK CONSUMER STATES THAT THE GAS TANK RUSTED THROUGH DUE TO A DEFECTIVE DESIGN. *SLC
Data vintage: August 2026. Sources: NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) complaints database, NHTSA recall campaign API, NHTSA NCAP crash-test ratings, and NHTSA FARS for fatality cross-reference.
Every figure on PlainCars is rendered directly from NHTSA complaint and safety data, no number is typed in by an editor. This year-specific record is rendered from NHTSA ODI, recall, and NCAP rows for the 1997 Ford Bronco; no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of August 2026.
Read our methodology - how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.