Total Complaints
4 filings
Mercury Capri · model year
4 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 1985 Mercury Capri posts below-average complaint volume among its own model-year siblings.
The 1985MercuryCapri carries 4 consumer safety complaints in NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation database for this specific model-year cohort. Within that volume, owners reported 0 crashes, 4 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 1985 Capri is electrical system:ignition:switch with 4 filings. Complaint categories reflect owner reports and intake categorization; they do not establish a defect pattern or cause.
NHTSA currently has 22 investigation files overlapping the 1985 Capri. 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
4 filings
Crashes Reported
0 reports
Source
NHTSA ODI
Federal complaints database
At or below the fleet median complaint volume.
| Component | Count |
|---|---|
| ELECTRICAL SYSTEM:IGNITION:SWITCH | 4 |
GARAGE / HOUSE FIRE CAUSED BY DEFECTIVE IGNITION SWITCH IN 1985 MERCURY CAPRI ASC MCLAREN. *JB
Mileage: 28,000
WIFE STARTED VEHICLE TO WARM UP, TURNED BACK, VEHICLE STARTED SMOKING AND THEN FIRE ENGULFED VEHICLE AND TOTALLY BURNED IT. *AK
WIFE STARTED VEHICLE TO WARM UP, TURNED BACK, VEHICLE STARTED SMOKING AND THEN FIRE ENGULFED VEHICLE AND TOTALLY BURNED IT. *AK
VEHICLE WAS PARKED AND CAUGHT FIRE, UNDER THE HOOD ENGINE COMPARTMENT FIRE, ELECTRICAL SHORT. *AK
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 1985 Mercury Capri; 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.