The bolts that hold the high-voltage battery pack in place under a Blue Bird electric school bus may be loose or missing, and the Fort Valley, Georgia manufacturer has recalled 1,590 buses over it. Blue Bird Body Company filed the campaign, 26V641, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on October 2, 2026. The buses are the Vision and the All American Electric, built in the 2018 through 2024 model years and again for 2026.
Blue Bird’s description of the consequence is short: loose or missing battery mounting bolts can cause a loss of drive power, raising crash risk. The remedy is a bolt-by-bolt check, and owner letters are expected December 1, 2026.
A battery pack that can shift on its mounts
NHTSA’s campaign record gives the defect in one line: the high voltage battery system mounting bolts may be loose or missing. A battery pack on an electric bus is a heavy, high-current assembly, and the bolts are the structural link to the chassis; the filing does not describe the mechanism by which loose fasteners would interrupt power. It states only the outcome, the loss of drive power while the bus is operating.
The open-data fields do not include the Part 573 report for this campaign, so cause, production dates, any incident counts and the date Blue Bird decided to file were not available for this article.
Vision and All American, with 2025 left out
The record lists 16 vehicle entries, which is eight model years for each of two buses. The Blue Bird Vision School Bus (Electric) is covered for 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2026. The Blue Bird All American School Bus (Electric) is covered for the same eight years. No 2025 model year appears for either bus, a gap that the NHTSA fields do not explain. The 1,590 is a single campaign total spread across those 16 entries; the open data does not split it by bus or by model year, so no count for the Vision alone or for any one year can be drawn from it.
A sister campaign reaches a smaller group. Recall 26V642000 covers 16 buses, the All American Transit Bus (Electric) in model years 2022, 2023 and 2024, and uses the same description of loose or missing battery bolts, the same remedy and the same Blue Bird recall number, R26AK. Those 16 transit buses are not counted in the 1,590 school buses.
Thread locker and a December 1 mailing
According to the NHTSA record, dealers will check the bolts and reinstall them with thread locker, replacing any that are damaged or missing, with Blue Bird covering the work. Owner letters are dated for December 1, 2026. Owners can reach Blue Bird customer service at 1-478-822-2242. The record flags the recall as neither a park-it nor a park-outside campaign and not an over-the-air update.
The December 1 mailing falls about two months after the filing, and the record sets out no interim instruction for operators in the meantime. Blue Bird’s recall number for the campaign is R26AK. For comparison, the January campaign carried owner and dealer notification dates of February 17, 2026, set under a phased recall, about six weeks after its filing.
Not the January 2026 recall
Blue Bird electric buses were also the subject of an earlier campaign, and the two should not be confused. Recall 26V002, a Part 573 report submitted January 5, 2026, covered 16 All American Transit Buses from model years 2022 through 2024 over loose 12-volt cables, after a customer reported in November 2025 that an electric school bus lost propulsion while moving and collided with a tree. Blue Bird’s customer service team had found a power cable unsecured at the 12-volt battery disconnect switch, the report lists the cause as still under investigation, and it estimates 1 percent of the covered buses contained the defect. Los Angeles Unified, which runs about 250 electric buses, many of them Blue Bird, said when NBC Los Angeles reported that recall on January 23 that it was inspecting its fleet and that its routes were running on schedule.
The January remedy was different in kind: dealers inspected the 12-volt connections, checked torque, tightened loose fasteners to specification and marked them with a torque stripe, and Blue Bird added torque verification to its quality check. Blue Bird also filed 26V246 in April 2026 over loose securing nuts on wiper blade assemblies, covering 103 buses, which makes the October filing at least the third Blue Bird campaign in the 2026 record read for this article.
The October campaign concerns the battery mounting, not the 12-volt cables, and it covers a far larger population. NHTSA’s filing list carries 26V641000 with a report-received date of October 2, 2026, and the count of 1,590 buses is the figure the record gives for the school-bus campaign alone.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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