BMW is recalling 720,796 vehicles in the United States over a fire risk, and the US road safety regulator has told owners to park outside and away from buildings and other vehicles until the cars are repaired.
The defect is an electrical connector on the water pump that is not properly sealed, which can allow water in and cause a short circuit, Hiru News reported, attributing its report to Reuters. BMW says the risk is present even when the engine is switched off and the car is parked, which is why the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has issued a park-outside instruction rather than a routine service notice.
A repeat of a 2024 recall
The same vehicles were recalled in 2024 over a water pump fault and were repaired then. Around ten fire incidents have been reported since that repair work was carried out, and BMW suspects those incidents may be connected to the defect now identified.
A fix for the current recall is still being developed.
Which vehicles
The recall covers certain 2 Series, 3 Series, 4 Series, 5 Series, X1, X3, X4, X5 and Z4 models built between 2012 and 2018.
Hiru’s filing gives the model lines and the overall span rather than a year range for each model, so owners should check their vehicle identification number against the regulator’s own recall lookup rather than rely on the model list alone.
A note on sourcing
This item is carried here on a single verified source. Hiru attributes its report to Reuters, but no Reuters, BBC, Associated Press, Al Jazeera or CNN filing on this recall was reachable from this desk at the time of writing, and the regulator’s own press release did not respond. The 720,796 figure and the park-outside instruction appear consistently across the secondary coverage this desk was able to see, none of which comes from a newsroom in its verified set.
Readers should also note that a CNN report describing a BMW park-outside fire-risk recall dates from September 2025 and concerns a different defect — a corroding engine starter relay affecting about 196,355 vehicles of model years 2019 to 2022. That is not this recall.
Not reported
The filing does not say whether any of the ten incidents caused injuries, when the repair will become available, or whether vehicles outside the United States — including any imported to Sri Lanka — are affected.
