One truck. That is the entire population of NHTSA recall 26V568: a single 2025 Ford F-650 SD fitted with a Marathon Industries liftgate whose deck pins can break and let the platform fall. A recall of exactly one vehicle is rare enough to draw a second look, and the filing explains why a defect that reached a whole product line shows up in the federal database as a campaign of one.
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The answer sits in the supply chain. The vehicle is a Ford, but the part at issue was built by someone else and bolted on by someone else again.
Campaign 26V568: one F-650, one liftgate
According to FleetOwner’s roundup of NHTSA commercial-vehicle recalls, Marathon Industries filed the campaign for a single 2025 F-650 SD, and NHTSA’s campaign record lists the units affected as one. Marathon, based in Santa Clara, California, is the recalling company, not Ford, because Marathon is the company that installed the liftgate and filed the report. The liftgate is a Waltco 3000-pound heavy-duty folding platform unit, built between April 15 and May 15, 2025, in model families the filing names as MDV-30, MDV-40 and MDVBG-45.
Marathon’s own count is one because it installed only one of the affected liftgates. The component manufacturer, Hiab USA of Perrysburg, Ohio, is running a broader recall, and the filing puts that population at about 168 units. The F-650 therefore is the Marathon-installed slice of a larger problem, which is why a one-truck campaign can exist at all: federal recall reports are filed by the company responsible for the equipment on each vehicle, and Marathon’s responsibility ended at the single liftgate it fitted. Owners of liftgates from other installers would look to those companies and to Hiab, not to this campaign, for their own notices.
How deck pins fail under a loaded platform
A liftgate platform hangs on deck pins, steel pins that carry the platform’s load through the hinge points while hydraulic cylinders raise and lower it. NHTSA’s report says the cylinders can operate unevenly, which puts excess stress on those pins until they fracture. The stated root cause is installation-related: the hydraulic systems were not properly bled of air, which led to asymmetric cylinder operation and cracking in the deck pins.
The consequence, in the agency’s wording, is plain: “A liftgate that falls unexpectedly increases the risk of injury.” The filing spells out the mechanism. If one or both deck pins break under load, the platform can collapse onto anyone standing on it or beside it, which for a liftgate means a worker loading cargo. No injuries have been reported in the filing.
Two field failures are on record, dated April 20 and April 28, 2026. Hiab reviewed deck pin warranty claims and inspected additional units after those failures, and the filing says Hiab stopped production on April 20, 2026. Two failures in the field, a halt in production and a pin redesign are the steps the filing documents between the first reports and the federal campaign.
The filing treats the lone truck as fully exposed. Marathon estimates that 100 percent of the vehicles in the campaign carry the defect, which in a population of one means the truck itself. That is a different statement from the ordinary recall language about a fraction of vehicles possibly being affected: here the question of whether a given unit is at risk has been answered in advance, and the open question is only whether the remedy has been carried out on it.
The free remedy and what owners watch for
The remedy, per the filing and FleetOwner, is a repair at no charge. Marathon will work with Hiab to inspect the platform bushings and hydraulic systems and replace the deck pins. The report specifies the replacement design: a bolt-clamp arrangement in place of the boss-bolt design, with the platform bushings replaced and the hydraulics inspected. Owner letters were expected in September 2026, and Marathon’s customer service line is 661-286-1520, while the NHTSA Safety Hotline is 888-327-4236.
The filing also lists the symptoms an operator can see before a pin gives way: uneven movement of the cylinders or the platform, trouble opening or closing the gate automatically, and deck pins that seize in their bushings. None of those require a mechanic to notice. A liftgate that tilts as it rises, or sticks as it folds, is the early sign that the two cylinders are no longer working in step.
Fleet owners and independent operators who want to confirm whether a truck is covered can search by vehicle identification number on NHTSA’s recall lookup for 26V568. The agency’s Part 573 recall report carries the full technical description, and NHTSA’s acknowledgement letter records the campaign as accepted. A campaign of one vehicle is a small recall by the numbers, but the underlying mechanism, a platform that can drop with a person under it, is the same one the larger Hiab population faces.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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