Fifteen 2023-2024 BYD Ride Type A school buses are the subject of a recall that BYD Coach & Bus reported to federal safety regulators on Oct. 22, 2026. The problem is an electrical contactor in the wheelchair lift that can fail and leave the controls unable to stop the platform. NHTSA’s own wording is blunt: a lift that continues to move while occupied increases the risk of injury.
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BYD’s remedy is to work with the lift maker, Ricon, to correct the wiring by installing two diodes at no charge to owners.
A relay that stays closed
A contactor is a heavy-duty electrical switch that connects the battery to the lift motor when an operator presses a button. In this defect the switch can stay closed, so the motor stays powered after the operator commands a stop. The agency’s recall record, filed under NHTSA ID 26V703000 and BYD campaign CAMP-082826-1105, lists 15 potentially affected buses and classes the component as adaptive and mobility equipment. It does not mark the buses as a fire risk when parked, and it carries no do-not-drive instruction.
The record is thin on cause. It does not name the contactor supplier or say how many of the 15 buses are expected to have the fault, and owner letters are not due to be mailed until Dec. 21, 2026, roughly two months after the report.
What Ricon’s own recall says about the mechanism
The clearest description of how a contactor sticks comes from Ricon’s earlier equipment recall, 26E-038, filed in June 2026. Ricon told NHTSA that an April 2026 incident on a public transit vehicle began with a lift moving toward the vehicle floor and then trying to stow while occupied, even after the operator cut power at the pendant, and that a person helping the occupant was reportedly injured. The company traced the failure to a metal DC contactor in which the control coil bolt was improperly oriented, shrinking an internal gap, so that debris could let the plunger latch the switch closed.
Ricon also reported that its supplier, Trombetta, moved production outside the United States in 2024 without notifying Ricon and without changing the part number. That recall covers 1,220 S-Series and K-Series lifts produced from Jan. 1, 2024, and Ricon said it "could not rule out" future occurrences. The BYD record does not state that its buses carry the same Trombetta part, so the link between the two campaigns rests on the identical diode remedy and the shared lift maker rather than on a stated supplier.
Ricon decided on a recall on June 16, 2026, and said it would not offer pre-remedy reimbursement because every affected unit is still under new-product warranty. The company’s consumer advisory for those lifts reads Do Not Drive, Park Outside, a stricter stance than the one on the BYD record.
The diode fix is simple to describe. Ricon said it will add two diodes to the lift wiring, between the control voltage and the contactors, to stop voltage from flowing backward so that the motor contactor drops out when the lift is told to stop. The company also acknowledged how hard the fault is to catch: it reproduced the condition once after extensive cycling and has not reproduced it in controlled tests with other contactors of the same type, which is why it found additional improperly oriented bolts in inspected parts and said debris could build up over time.
The same fix on other fleets
Other builders that bought the same lifts have filed their own paperwork. Coach and Equipment Manufacturing Corp. told NHTSA in July 2026, in Recall 26V-472, that about 131 Phoenix and Metrolite transit buses carry Ricon S-Series lifts with a contactor that can keep the platform motor energized after a stop command. Its remedy is the same pair of diodes, installed at no cost. A third-party tracker summarizing the Ricon campaign, vehiclesafetyrecalls.com, lists the recall’s completion rate at 0.00, meaning no repairs had been logged when it was captured.
The timing across the related campaigns shows how slowly these fixes reach vehicles. Ricon made a production change on June 23, 2026, according to the Coach and Equipment report, and that builder planned phased owner notices for Aug. 3 to 7, 2026, with no dealer notification. The BYD buses, reported more than three months later, still had their owner letters about two months out when the record was captured.
Owners and school districts can confirm whether a particular bus is included by entering its VIN at NHTSA’s recall search. The unanswered question in the BYD record is how a lift defect first documented in an April 2026 injury reached 15 school buses built in 2023 and 2024, and what BYD and Ricon will tell regulators when the remedy plan is filed. Neither company is quoted in the agency record, which carries only the filing text and the remedy description.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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