Jeep has recalled nearly 63,000 plug-in hybrid Wranglers due to a software glitch that could shut the engine down and cause a vehicle crash without warning. Dealers have been banned from selling any more of these vehicles until proper repairs can be made.
According to a notice posted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), all of the 62,909 vehicles that are covered by the recall have this potentially dangerous defect. It affects 2021 and 2022 Jeep Wrangler 4xe models with 2.0L Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle engines.
The Jeeps in question could experience an engine shutdown as a result of “diagnostic reactions to faults caused by loss of communication,” according to the notice. Jeep will be updating calibration software for the vehicle’s hybrid control processor, auxiliary hybrid control processor and transmission control module to correct the problem, according to the NHTSA.
For many hybrid Jeep owners, the recall was a long time coming. Jeep’s parent company, Chrysler, started investigating reports of the problem in September of 2021. After conducting an analysis that took longer than a year, they found multiple complaints and warranty claims. So far, two accidents and one injury have been potentially linked to the problem.
It’s not the only problem this vehicle has encountered, with The Drive reporting that three other recall notices have impacted different Wrangler models for safety issues related to the fuel pump, the fuse within the high-voltage battery and the side marker lights. Owners who want to check whether their vehicle is impacted by one of these recalls can enter their Vehicle Identification Number at the NHTSA recall’s website.
According to Jeep, the Wrangler 4xe is currently America’s best-selling plug-in hybrid vehicle. It has a starting price of $56,530, and many owners bought the vehicles to take advantage of the federal $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit.
Hundreds of thousands of hybrid vehicles have been recalled over safety issues
Hybrids have been at the center of many recalls this year. This summer, Ford issued a recall for hybrid vehicles in its Escape, Maverick and Corsair lines from model years 2020 to 2022 over concerns about their potential to cause a fire. More than 100,000 vehicles in the U.S., all of which had 2.5L hybrid and plug-in hybrid electric engines, were affected. In an engine failure, the vehicles could potentially release a considerable amount of fuel vapor and engine oil that could accumulate near the ignition source and lead to a fire under the hood or cause components inside to melt.
A month earlier, Ford recalled nearly 50,000 Mach-E EVs due to concerns about their high-voltage battery connectors potentially overheating. That issue could prevent the car from starting or cause it to lose its propulsion power while driving.
In March, Volkswagen Group had to recall more than 100,000 plug-in hybrid vehicles around the world because of the risk of fire. The recall affected more than 42,000 Passat, Tiguan, Arteon and Golf models, while Audi recalled 24,000 vehicles. The problem was a risk of fire resulting from insufficient insulation on the vehicles’ high-voltage battery. 16 fires related to the problem were reported in Germany alone.
Last month, Kia recalled more than 27,000 of its Nero hybrids for model years 2017 and 2018 for a second time because some dealerships failed to properly repair a hybrid powertrain component that was found to potentially caused fires if it fails. This means that owners who already brought their car in for a recall repair in 2018 need to bring it in to a dealership again for inspection and possibly yet another repair. The issue was discovered after multiple reports of repaired vehicles catching on fire.
A study involving data from the National Transportation Safety Board found that hybrids are involved in the vast majority of car fires, outnumbering the number of fires per 100,000 vehicles sold on record for both gasoline-powered and electric cars combined.
Sources for this article include:
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.