Freightliner Trucks is a US semi truck manufacturer. Founded in 1929 as the truck-manufacturing division of Consolidated Freightways (from which it derives its name), the company was established in 1942 as Freightliner Corporation. Owned by Daimler AG from 1981 to 2021, Freightliner is now a part of Daimler Truck subsidiary Daimler Truck North America (along with Western Star, Detroit Diesel, and Thomas Built Buses). Freightliner produces a range of vans, medium-duty trucks, and heavy-duty trucks; under its Freightliner Custom Chassis subsidiary, the company produces bare chassis and cutaway chassis for multiple types of vehicles. The company popularized the use of cabover (COE) semitractors, with the Freightliner Argosy later becoming the final example of the type sold in North America. The company is headquartered in Portland, Oregon (the city of its founding); vehicles are currently manufactured in Cleveland and Mount Holly, North Carolina and Santiago Tianguistenco and Saltillo, Mexico. Legal controversy As of December 2020, Freightliner is under a court order to improve safety, and was fined $30 million by the NHTSA after an investigation found that Freightliner had failed to recall dozens of known safety defects in its vehicles. In 2019 alone Freightliner was forced to issue safety recalls 24 separate times by the NHTSA, and there have been over 100 recalls total on its flagship truck, the Cascadia. The Judge found that Freightliner had no system in place to track faults, and ordered $5 million of the fine be applied to upgrading outdated paper-based systems and converting to recall software used by other automakers for decades. As of May 2021 Freightliner has at least three open investigations against it for electrical issues, including several fires. Several weeks after the fine was issued by the NHTSA, Freightliner CEO Roger Nielsen was replaced by John O’Leary, a senior executive from Mercedes Benz trucks, and former CFO of their parent company Daimler Trucks. History Founding (1930s) Freightliner traces its roots to 1929; following the founding of Consolidated Freightways (CF) in Portland, Oregon, company founder Leland James set up a company division to produce semitractors for company use. Developed in a CF maintenance facility, Freightways Manufacturing used Fageol vehicles as a starting point for the design, placing the cab above the front axle. Shorter in length, the new Freightways truck allowed for CF to use a longer trailer and remain in compliance of the stringent length laws of the time. In line with