Jeep Issues Emergency Recall for OTA-Bricked Wrangler 4xes

Last Friday, we said Jeep had left its customers in the lurch after the company pushed out an over-the-air update for its Wrangler 4xe plug-in hybrids that effectively bricked a whole bunch of customer cars a week prior. Well, now Jeep is recalling all of the cars that were impacted by the issue to make sure they can get back on the road. This isn’t the sort of thing we normally track, but Jeep may have just set a record for the fastest turn-around on issuing a safety recall. Hey, that may not be the sort of award you stick in the break room trophy case, but it ain’t nothin’, either.

The original push was meant to patch the vehicle’s telematics system, but what should have been a routine, over-the-air software update ended up rendering a vast swath of vehicles essentially inoperable. One tipster who contacted us directly said that the update left her unable to coax the car out of her immediate neighborhood without it losing power.

Here’s what is going wrong, according to Jeep’s recall report:

“Some 2023-2025 MY Jeep Wrangler Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (‘PHEV’) may have been updated with Firmware Over-The-Air (‘FOTA’) software which may cause incomplete communication between the Telematics Box Module (‘TBM’) and the Hybrid Control Processor (‘HCP’).

“Incomplete communication between the TBM and the HCP may cause the HCP to perform a reset,” the report said. “An HCP which resets while driving may cause a loss of motive power which can cause a vehicle crash without prior warning.”

The good news? Rolling back the update fixes the problem, and since it wasn’t patching anything critical, there’s no danger in doing so. This allows customers to continue operating their Wranglers normally while Stellantis engineers work on a permanent solution, but that came too late for numerous owners who had already dropped their trucks at the dealer (many having towed them). While they likely have their vehicles back in their driveways by now, the even-better news is that Jeep knows what went wrong, and its software geeks have a permanent fix in development, however they offered no ETA.

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