Altec Industries has told federal safety regulators that 45 of its Digger Derrick trucks may have been assembled with the wrong bolts securing the front winch bumper. If the bolts let go, the bumper can drop off the truck and onto the roadway, and the same fasteners can also fail without warning while the winch is under load.
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration received the filing on October 9, 2026, and logged it as campaign 26V665000. Altec’s internal reference for the recall is CSN-3375.
Incorrect bolts on a winch bumper
The 45 vehicles in the federal recall dataset are 2023 and 2024 model-year Digger Derricks, the utility-service trucks that carry a boom and an auger for setting and pulling poles. NHTSA classifies the defect under structure, body and bumpers, and its recall lookup for 26V665000 is the public entry point for owners who want to check a truck. Altec’s summary says certain vehicles may have a front winch bumper that was secured with incorrect bolts, which could allow the bumper to detach.
The record names two separate consequences. A bumper that comes off while the truck is moving becomes a road hazard for traffic behind it and raises the risk of a crash. Bolts that fail during winch operation put the person working the winch at risk of injury, a hazard that has nothing to do with highway speed and exists on a job site as much as on a road. NHTSA’s data feed marks the recall as carrying no fire risk when parked and no do-not-drive instruction. Owners are not told to park the trucks, which fits a defect that depends on a fastener being wrong rather than a part being visibly broken.
The same NHTSA campaign lookup returns two entries for the campaign, one for model year 2024 and one for model year 2023, and each carries the figure 45 as the potential number of units affected. That pattern points to 45 as the campaign total shared across both model years rather than a count for each year, so adding the entries together would double the population.
The remedy: correct bolts, free, with letters due December 4
Altec will install the correct bolts on the front bumper of each affected truck at no cost to the owner. Owner notification letters are scheduled to go out on December 4, 2026, roughly eight weeks after the October 9 filing. Owners with questions before then can call Altec customer service at 1-877-462-5832 and cite CSN-3375.
The correction described in the record is limited to the fasteners. Altec’s filing calls for the correct bolts to be installed on the front bumper, with no mention of replacing the bumper, the winch or the mounting structure. That scope suggests the hardware, not the design, was wrong on these trucks, though the summary does not say what size or grade the incorrect bolts were or what the correct ones should be. Trucks of this kind are typically fleet assets that utilities and contractors operate, so the practical contact is often a fleet manager rather than an individual buyer. The NHTSA record does not list customers or fleets, and it does not say how many of the 45 trucks have already been inspected or fixed.
An earlier Altec bumper recall covered 124 vehicles
The campaign has a close predecessor. On August 14, 2025, Altec filed campaign 25V529, and the NHTSA acknowledgment letter for that recall describes the same defect in nearly the same words: some front winch bumpers may be secured with incorrect bolts, so the bumper can detach, and the bolts can fail suddenly during winch operation. That recall covered up to 124 units of 2024 and 2025 Altec Aerial Device and Digger Derrick vehicles.
Trade press picked up the earlier action within two weeks. FleetOwner’s recall roundup of August 27, 2025 listed it under Altec’s own number CSN-3244. The 2026 filing carries CSN-3375 and a new NHTSA number, so the two actions are separate campaigns, and the new one is about 36 percent the size of the old one: 45 trucks against 124.
The acknowledgment is dated August 20, 2025, was addressed to Joshua Chard at Altec, and was signed by Alex Ansley, chief of NHTSA’s Recall Management Division in the Office of Defects Investigation Enforcement. It expected owner letters to be mailed by October 10, 2025, and it listed the same free bolt replacement as the remedy, along with Altec’s customer service line and NHTSA’s vehicle safety hotline at 1-888-327-4236.
Model year 2024 appears in both campaigns
Model year 2024 appears in both campaigns, which raises a question the public summaries do not answer: whether any of the 45 trucks in the new recall were also among the 124 in the 2025 recall, or whether the new campaign found trucks that the first one missed. Neither the dataset record nor the 2025 letter lays out how Altec traced the wrong bolts to specific build dates or specific suppliers.
The answer should come from Altec’s own Part 573 report for 26V665, which sets out the defect chronology and the affected build range. Until the owner letters reach fleets on December 4, the federal record shows a single firm number for the new campaign: 45 trucks, filed on October 9, with the fix still waiting on Altec’s bolts.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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