A Florida owner’s 2025 Ram 1500 Rebel flashed a warning that its safety features were disabled at about 1,200 miles, and a dealership that held the truck for more than a month replaced its brake booster without, the owner says, ever naming a cause. That owner, Tim Craig, is one of two named plaintiffs in a proposed class action against FCA U.S. LLC, the Stellantis subsidiary that builds Ram, over the 3.0-liter Hurricane twin-turbo engine in the 2025 truck.
The suit, filed in federal court in Michigan on August 25, 2026, claims the engine’s control software and hardware let trucks lose power, stall and lose power-assisted braking. None of that has been tested in court, and no response from the company has been made public.
Two trucks, and the plaintiffs’ account of the failures
The complaint, Norberg et al. v. FCA U.S. LLC, No. 2:26-cv-13040 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, is built around two trucks. Charlene Norberg of Wisconsin bought her 2025 Ram 1500 in August 2024. Her truck allegedly stalled twice during remote starts and, in July 2026, overheated and dropped into limp mode on a highway, which required a tow. Craig, the Florida plaintiff, bought his Rebel in May 2025.
According to CarComplaints, which summarized the filing on September 13, Craig’s dashboard displayed the safety-features-disabled message at 1,200 miles and the dealership kept the truck over a month before replacing the brake booster. The lawsuit’s own symptom list is wider than either truck: check engine lights, loss of engine power, repeated diagnostic trouble codes, loss of power brakes, battery drain requiring a drivetrain control module replacement, misfires, hesitation and limp mode. Some trucks were serviced eight or more times, the complaint says.
A control-module defect, not a mechanical one
The complaint’s theory is that 2025 Ram 1500 trucks with the Hurricane carry “defective engine control modules and/or powertrain control modules,” the computers that manage fuel, boost and timing in an engine that is heavily electronic. AutoGuide’s account puts it as “software and hardware flaws” in the ECM and PCM, and says FCA allegedly knew of the trouble through quality tracking, pre-production testing and complaints to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA.
The plaintiffs say dealerships “have been unable or unwilling to adequately repair” the trucks and that “Chrysler knew about the Hurricane engine problems but concealed the information from consumers.”
The engine at issue is not a side option. In Stellantis’ announcement of the 2025 Ram 1500, the standard 3.0-liter Hurricane makes 420 horsepower and 469 pound-feet of torque, and a High Output version makes 540 horsepower. Ram brand chief executive Tim Kuniskis pitched the new engines at launch as delivering more power, more performance and more fuel efficiency than the V-8 they replaced. The company introduced the twin-turbo straight-six as the replacement for the previous V-8 across the truck’s lineup, so any defect tied to the standard engine’s control modules would reach a large share of the model year rather than a single trim.
Five counts and a nationwide class
The complaint pleads five counts: violation of the Wisconsin Deceptive Trade Practices Act, violation of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, breach of implied warranty, fraudulent concealment and unjust enrichment. It proposes a nationwide class of owners and lessees of affected 2025 Ram 1500 trucks plus Wisconsin and Florida subclasses. The relief sought includes class certification, repair, recall or replacement, damages for economic loss and diminished value, disgorgement of profits, punitive damages and attorney fees. CarComplaints reports the amount in controversy as more than $5 million, and names The Miller Law Firm PC and Sauder Schelkopf LLC as counsel.
Whether the defect the plaintiffs describe is a safety defect in the regulatory sense is a separate matter from whether it is a consumer-protection claim, and the federal record does not yet reach it. Yahoo Autos reports that NHTSA data lists 327 complaints for the 2025 Ram 1500 Crew Cab and Quad Cab, with zero open defect investigations specific to that model year, and that the seven existing recalls concern issues such as seat belt anchors and display failures rather than stalling. That article also found no response from FCA in court and no recall or settlement for the alleged defect.
Class certification is the next hurdle. Two trucks, one bought in 2024 and one in 2025, are the factual base for a nationwide claim, so plaintiffs will have to show that the same defect sits behind failures as different as a stall during remote start, an overheating episode on a highway and a brake booster warning at 1,200 miles. A judge will have to decide whether their failures, eight-plus dealer visits included, look like the same problem as everyone else’s before any of the five counts can go forward on behalf of other owners.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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