Gillig, the California bus builder, has told federal regulators that remote fuel-filter hoses on 1,853 of its Low Floor transit buses can pull loose from their fittings and spill diesel. The campaign is NHTSA 26V707000 and covers model years 2021 through 2026. Cummins, which supplied the hoses, will replace them at no charge.
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration received the report on October 23, 2026, and files it under the diesel fuel system. Its stated consequence is short and specific: a fuel leak in the presence of an ignition source increases the risk of a fire. The same record notes that a separated hose can also starve the engine and stall the bus, which matters on a route as much as in a depot.
Where a hose can let go
The part is the remote fuel-filter hose, a flexible line that carries diesel between the engine and a filter mounted away from it. According to the NHTSA recall record, the hoses may separate from their fitting. Owners are told to contact Cummins or Gillig customer service, and no owner-letter date appears in the fields published so far, so the schedule for notices is still unknown.
A leak of this kind is dangerous mostly because of what sits nearby. A diesel bus carries a hot engine, exhaust components and electrical wiring in a tight compartment, and any of them can serve as the ignition source that the filing names. A stalled engine adds a second hazard, and NHTSA’s 2024 letter on the earlier hose campaign said plainly that lost fuel supply can stall the engine and raise crash risk. A transit bus is rarely alone when that happens: it is usually in traffic, with standing passengers and no shoulder to coast to. The agency’s two stated risks, fire and stall, therefore point to different moments in the same failure, one at the depot and one on the street.
Fifty-four buses in 2024, 1,853 now
Gillig has recalled this same family of hoses before, and the earlier campaign was tiny. Its June 2024 filing, recall 24V-390, covered 54 buses from the 2023 model year with Cummins L9 diesel engines. That report blamed insufficient crimping of the hose connector, said Cummins had corrected production on April 1, 2023, and prescribed replacement hoses carrying a date code of 230310 or later.
The regulator’s reaction in 2024 is on the record too. In a June 7, 2024 letter, Alex Ansley, chief of NHTSA’s Recall Management Division, told Gillig vice president of engineering Kurt Vorsatz that the company had to file an amended report with a chronology of warranty claims and field reports, send copies of all recall communications within five days, and submit eight consecutive quarterly status reports. Neither the cause nor the remedy in the 2026 listing is spelled out in the fields available, so it is not yet clear whether the same crimp defect has now spread across model years 2021 through 2026.
The jump in scale is the notable thing: from 54 buses to 1,853 is about a 34-fold increase for what the record describes as the same kind of hose failure.
A second fire-risk recall this year
This is not Gillig’s first fuel-system campaign of 2026. In March the company filed recall 26V142 on 3,568 Low Floor diesel buses built from May 7, 2021 to March 9, 2026. In that case an air compressor intake pipe that may not be installed correctly can rub against the engine fuel line, and owners were advised not to drive the vehicles and to park them outside. The trigger was a customer report of smoke from a rear engine compartment on February 12, 2026.
The two campaigns involve different parts but overlap in years and in the same compartment. A transit agency with a 2022 Low Floor in its fleet could be affected by both, and the 2026 intake-pipe filing shows how quickly the company treated a fuel-line hazard as a stop-driving problem. The October filing carries no such parking instruction in the record summarized here.
What agencies and riders can do
Agencies running Gillig fleets are the ones who will get the call, because the manufacturer sells directly and has no dealer network; its 2024 report says dealer dates are pro forma for that reason. Fleet managers can check vehicle numbers on NHTSA’s recall lookup, which warns that some recent campaigns are not yet searchable by VIN, then contact Cummins or Gillig directly. The builder describes its range on its own site as covering clean diesel, compressed natural gas, hybrid and battery electric powertrains, but this recall concerns diesel fuel systems only.
Riders have no repair to arrange. What remains open is the question the filing does not answer: how many hoses have actually come loose in service, and whether any bus has leaked fuel on a route. The 2024 report did not state a failure count either.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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