A control node can go dark on 66 ambulances and take the warning lights with it

A recall covering 66 ambulances comes down to one small electronic part: a control node that can stop responding and, in doing so, shut off the emergency warning lights. REV Ambulance Group Orlando, Inc., which builds the vehicles under the Road Rescue and Wheeled Coach names, reported the problem to federal safety regulators in October 2026. The affected vehicles are model years 2025 through 2027, and the remedy is a replacement part supplied at no cost.

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The count is modest beside a typical passenger-car recall, yet the failure lands on a vehicle whose lights are part of the job. An ambulance working its way through traffic depends on being seen, and the recall describes a fault that removes that signal without any action by the crew.

The S-Node 8×16 and the lights it controls

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration logged the filing as campaign 26V649, with a report received date of Oct. 5, 2026. NHTSA’s full identifier for the filing is 26V649000, and the manufacturer appears in the database as REV Ambulance Group Orlando, Inc., abbreviated REVO. The record lists 66 potentially affected vehicles. That figure counts ambulances that carry the part, not ambulances that have failed, and the record does not claim otherwise. The manufacturer’s description of the defect is brief: a node “may become unresponsive, causing connected components, such as vehicle warning lights, to lose functionality.”

The consequence statement is equally direct. “A loss of warning lights can increase the risk of a crash,” the NHTSA record says, and the same record files the component under emergency equipment: siren, lighting and strobe controls. Warning lights are named as the example of a connected component that can lose function. The summary does not list sirens or any other equipment as affected, and nothing in the record should be read as saying more than that.

The part at the center of the fix is the S-Node 8×16, identified in the record as Node 5. In the words of the campaign summary, the company will provide a replacement at no charge. Owner letters are expected to be mailed in October 2026, though the record gives no exact mailing date. The vehicle-level listing also repeats the consequence language and the remedy, so the two lookups tell a consistent story. Owners with questions can reach the manufacturer’s customer service line at 1-855-661-9232, a number that appears in the vehicle-level listing for the Road Rescue Type 1 ambulance.

The timing is worth stating plainly. NHTSA’s record shows the report received on Oct. 5, 2026, and says the owner letters are expected during the same month. Under the 60-day notification window described in the agency’s consumer brochure, the clock for contacting every registered owner runs from the start of the recall, so the notice obligation is measured in weeks, not months. The record gives no repair-time estimate and no parts-availability date, which leaves the actual scheduling of the node swaps to each operator and its service shop.

Three model lines under two brand names

The campaign covers three model groups: Road Rescue Type 1 and Road Rescue Type III ambulances from model years 2025 through 2027, and Wheeled Coach Type III ambulances from model years 2025 and 2026. Counted by model year, that makes eight separate entries in the federal database: Road Rescue Type 1 for 2025, 2026 and 2027, Road Rescue Type III for the same three years, and Wheeled Coach Type III for 2025 and 2026. The record is inconsistent about how it labels them. The lookup for the Wheeled Coach Type III 2025 listing returns the same campaign and the same 66-unit figure, while the make and model fields on the Road Rescue listing show a narrower slice than the summary text does.

Both brands sit under REV Group. The company’s ambulance page calls Road Rescue “a premier, custom ambulance builder for fire/EMS agencies and healthcare systems,” building one-of-a-kind Type 1, Type 3 and medium-duty ambulances. It describes Wheeled Coach as “an iconic American ambulance brand” that has built ambulances since the 1970s for commercial, municipal and government customers. REV Group’s other ambulance names, AEV, Horton and Leader, do not appear in this recall.

How a recall like this reaches an ambulance operator

Federal rules put the cost on the manufacturer. NHTSA’s consumer brochure on safety defects and recalls says a manufacturer must remedy a safety defect at no charge and must notify registered owners and lessees by first-class mail within 60 days after the recall begins. The notice has to describe the risk and explain how to obtain the free remedy. For an ambulance, that means the letter goes to the agency or company that owns the vehicle, which then has to arrange the repair around its service calendar.

The campaign record is notable for what it leaves out. It contains no instruction to park the vehicles or keep them outside, and it lists no over-the-air software update, so the remedy is a hardware swap carried out at a service visit. A fleet that wants to know where it stands can enter vehicle identification numbers into NHTSA’s recall lookup instead of waiting for the mail.

What the record does not provide is any measure of how often the node has actually gone dark. It carries no notes on failures, injuries or crashes, and it states the 66 as potential units only. The exposure the filing defines is therefore a population of vehicles that could lose their warning lights, put at 66 by the manufacturer’s report to NHTSA, with the replacement S-Node as the only remedy named and owner letters still to arrive when the record was read on Oct. 26.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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