2016 INTERNATIONAL LF687 — Complaint #1861490
Open-data reference.
NHTSA Complaint about TRAILER HITCHES:FIFTH WHEEL ASSEMBLY filed December 27, 2022
NHTSA complaint #1861490 (ODI reference 11498924) concerns a 2016 INTERNATIONAL LF687 and was filed on December 27, 2022. The owner reports the failure occurred on December 2, 2022. The report was geocoded to Wisconsin based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as trailer hitches:fifth wheel assembly, one of NHTSA's standardized taxonomy codes used to group defect patterns across make, model, and year.
The filer flagged the following severity indicators: crash: no, fire: no, injuries: 0, fatalities: 0. No crash, fire, or fatality was associated with this report, which places it in the early-warning stream rather than the priority-review stream. Because a VIN was supplied, this complaint is tied to a specific vehicle and not just a model-year cohort.
Individual complaints are consumer-submitted and unverified by NHTSA engineers — the agency's role at this stage is to collect, index, and make them searchable. What matters for federal action is the pattern: when many owners of the same INTERNATIONAL LF687 cohort independently describe similar trailer hitches:fifth wheel assembly failures, defect investigators have grounds to open a PE and request manufacturer data. Related filings for the same vehicle and component appear below, and the detail page for the full 2016 INTERNATIONAL LF687 shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.
Complaint Description
Minimizer sells a piece of plastic that bolts to the top of semi truck 5th wheel and under trailers. Minimizer claims this plastic is designed for frequent drop and hook applications. The plastic can't handle the huge forces between semi truck and trailer and is easily pushed off the 5th wheel leaving only the bolts sticking up out of the top of the 5th wheel. When this happens there is no grease between the trailer and 5th wheel plate, only the bolts sticking up and out of the top of the 5th wheel. As you can imagine the bolts dig into the underside of the trailer making steering a problem on the snow covered roadway. Minimizer Document #10005364 says to "continue to follow 5th wheel manufacturer's lubrication and maintenance recommendations for the locking mechanism and king pin." which requires grease and greasy parts to be in very close proximity to the plastic. The plastic cannot handle the grease, fact is, In the same document the Warranty excludes damage caused by exposure to
Complaint Details
| NHTSA Complaint ID | 1861490 |
| ODI Number | 11498924 |
| Date Filed | December 27, 2022 |
| Failure Date | December 2, 2022 |
| VIN | 3HSDJSNR9GN |
Source: NHTSA Vehicle Complaints Database. Component taxonomy and severity codes are standardized by NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation.
Read our methodology — how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.