FREIGHTLINER Complaints

The contact owns a 2021 Freightliner M2. The contact stated that while a driver was driving at an undisclosed speed, the vehicle started decelerating unintendedly and then stalled. There were no warning lights illuminated. The driver was able to coast to the side of the roadway. The driver was unable to restart the vehicle. The vehicle was towed to the dealer who stated that there was an excessive amount of oil in the engine. The dealer determined that the engine had failed and needed to be replaced. The dealer linked the failure to NHTSA Campaign Number: 20V466000 (Electrical System, Engine); but the VIN was not included in the recall, and the vehicle was out of warranty. The vehicle was not repaired. The manufacturer was not made aware of the failure. The failure mileage was approximately 151,024.

I am writing to bring to your attention a potentially dangerous situation caused by what I believe to be a manufacturer design flaw with the SS 1034797 M2, 108SD, 114SD Coolant Level Sensor P/N 06-93316-002. On [XXX], one of our trucks (VIN: [XXX]) experienced a low coolant warning and an automatic engine shutdown while traveling on the interstate in a construction zone. As you can imagine, the sudden stoppage of a tractor-trailer in the traffic lanes of a freeway presents an extremely hazardous situation, not only for our driver but for all motorists in the vicinity. For us as a motor carrier, this is compounded by the likelihood of legal liability resulting from any collision involving a stationary truck in such conditions. The root cause of this incident appears to be the failure of the magnet within the surge tank to maintain its buoyancy. When the magnet sinks to the bottom of the tank, it signals the engine control module (ECM) that the coolant level is critically low, triggering an engine shutdown. While I understand the intent is to protect the engine from potential damage, this design flaw creates an unacceptably dangerous scenario—especially since, in many cases, the engine is not actually at risk of damage. In this instance, I instructed the driver to unplug and after a 15-minute period, he restarted the truck and drove to a nearby truck stop. Remarkably, the truck remains operational without the sensor repair, further underscoring the superficial nature of this issue. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. We have encountered similar sensor failures across our fleet, but this particular event was the most severe. While I am not an engineer, it seems logical that the coolant level sensor should be paired with a high-temperature reading before an engine shutdown is initiated. INFORMATION REDACTED PURSUANT TO THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. 552(B)(6)

The crosswind/lane departure system needs to have a way to be disabled by the user. Thanks

It is hard to impossible to drive the truck in a straight line (compared to models without the smartvalves), and often drifts side to side randomly without any warning or feedback. The steering requires constant input, and the "feel" of the truck is not correct to allow intuitive steering. When driving in tight areas, I find that I need to stay at least a foot away from barriers or other objects to not be in danger of hitting them. When in width-limited areas, like construction zones, I often need to straddle the center line and block other vehicles from passing me, so as not to be in danger of collision. These controllability problems are induced by the "active" smartvalve system. This is the chassis leveling system that adjusts air to the suspension air springs (air bags). The smart valve system is there to allow a driver to adjust the suspension up or down as needed to assist in hooking in improperly positioned trailer (to prevent injuries). The system also actively interferes with what would be the normal operation of a suspension "leveling" valve, and adjusts and or blocks the normal flow of air in and out of the suspension when driving. This results in poor handling and control problems. I have asked to have the valve replaced with a normal "dumb" valve on my truck, since I have found that the trucks handle normally with a standard leveling valve. I have also found that in many curvy road situations, the truck is hard to keep from running off the road, even bobtail. There is severe apparent understeer, and it seems likely to be attributed to the smartvalve leveler interfering with the suspension. I see that there is a recall on Freightliners having to do with understeer problems on curves (Recall 234245 [USA]: Understeering during a j-turn may increase the risk of a crash.). The recall says that Freightliner will replace the tires; it is likely that this will not help in the case of models with an active "smartvalve" system.

The cruise control has been programmed to stay engaged, in many instances, after the driver has used the foot brake. In some situations, like approaching a traffic circle, I have slowed down with the foot brake, then had the truck unexpectedly start to accelerate after I released the brake. This apparently has to do with a vehicle in my headway allowing the cruise to remain engaged, and then after the vehicle leaves my headway the truck thinks it can accelerate again. There is never a good reason for the cruise control in any vehicle to remain engaged after using the brakes. This results in unpredicted situations, like unplanned acceleration. This also applies to vehicles trying to merge in front of me, where I use the brakes to back off some and allow them in, but then the cruise (still engaged) will accelerate again toward the vehicle that was previously in my headway.

Complaint 1 When using cruise control in 2024 Freightliner Cascadia trucks with level 2 autonomous driving features, there is no option to turn off the autonomous driving features (and use standard cruise control); the driver is forced to use the system if he wants or needs to use cruise control. This apparently is a software setting that is available in some versions, but is not available in models bought/leased to large trucking companies. Complaint 2 There is no way to adjust the "agressiveness" of the self-driving (acceleration and braking) feature of these trucks. The default in this model truck is unknown to me, but in slow-and-go or stop-and-go traffic, the truck is highly aggressive; the truck follows too close very often, and waits until the last second to slow or stop in most cases. This also happens in high volume, higher speed traffic.

These trucks have a non-adjustable default setting for Over and Under cruise control speed setting. This means, in the case of the truck I drove, that the cruise control will allow the truck to go 5 mph over the set speed before engaging the engine brake, or 4 mph under the setting before accelerating. The problem is that when set for the speed limit, the truck will climb to 7 mph over the set speed before engaging engine brake. When driving on a downgrade with a lot of weight, the truck quickly gets to well over a safe speed before the truck will attempt to slow down. This often results in an overspeed situation when approaching curves. In older models of Freightliner, and maybe in current versions that are adjustable, there is a setting to change this to closer to the set speed. In this model, or large companies' ordered versions, this adjustment is not available. The idea is to save fuel by "hyper-mile" style of driving. It makes for an unpredictable speed of vehicle, frustrating other drivers, and sometimes leading to unsafe overspeed situations.

When a vehicle is merging into my lane, the truck will often not detect or react to the encroaching vehicle; this happens even when there is plenty of space, and the encroaching vehicle is halfway into my lane. I have had to intervene several times, since the truck was accelerating toward the previous vehicle in my headway, and ingoring the intervening merging vehicle. In contrast, the sensors in the truck apparently can see when a vehicle is near to the front, and mostly out of the headway of the truck (only part of the front vehicle in my lane, like when exiting). This truck will brake, and continue braking unnecessarily (and unnecessarily hard braking) for a vehicle that is completely out of my lane (by several feet), before continuing and regaining speed. This shows that the sensors are capable of "seeing" and tracking the vechicles, but still does not respond to traffic merging into the truck's headway.

When driving in highway traffic at moderate to high speeds (as well as low speeds), the truck will often accelerate with (and towards) a vehicle that is less than 1 second ahead of the truck. Certainly this often happens when there is not a safe distance between the truck and the next vehicle. The trucks systems in no way seem to expect that the next vehicle could slam on brakes at any moment. I have had this happen many times when a vehicle merges too close in front of me and then accelerates. The truck will accelerate with the vehicle (that the truck is now tailgating), even though there is slowing or stopping traffic directly ahead of the vehicle the truck is following. The Safety Director at Tyson Foods, Robert Carl, told me in a conference call about the unsafe flaws in the truck, that these Freightliner systems are programmed to "try" to maintain about a 2.5 second following distance. Even this is patently unsafe. Driver safety guidelines (FMCSA) are: "If you are driving below 40 mph, you should leave at least one second for every 10 feet of vehicle length. For a typical tractor-trailer, this results in 4 seconds between you and the leading vehicle. For speeds over 40 mph, you should leave one additional second." It would appear that Daimler/Freightliner may have used Autonomous Driving software that was designed for cars, and has tried to "adjust" it to work in tractor-trailers. That is speculation, but based on the supposed target following distance, that may be correct. 2.5 seconds is certainly too close, and the distances of less than 1 second that I have commonly seen are not acceptable in any truck.

When approaching stopped traffic, sometimes the truck will respond and begin to slow down. At other times, the truck will continue at set speed toward a detected stopped vehicle, and in situations where the time and distance are way too short to justify no reaction by the system. The truck at sometimes acts like it is auto-driving; at others it acts as if it is only in crash-mitigation mode, and will wait for the driver until the last possible second and then slam on brakes. There have been some times where the truck actually gave a collision warning (alarm and display turns red), but in no way attempted to slow itself. This happens with vehicles detected in the truck's headway for multiple seconds beforehand. In short, the truck will sometimes apparently allow itself to rear-end a vehicle in front of itself, even though the sensors detected it and it had plenty of time to react. When there has been a collision warning with no action by the autonomous system, it has often been when there is less than 1/2 second for the driver to intervene.