Dead Truck, Kind Strangers: Our Night in Conway, Arkansas

We were about twenty minutes out from the KOA in North Little Rock, cruising at 70 in the center lane and coming up on a busy interchange in rush-hour traffic, when the truck just… let go. Not a sputter, not a warning — the power simply wasn’t there anymore. I pushed the throttle and got nothing back, like the pedal wasn’t connected to anything. I dropped it into neutral and watched the RPMs fall straight to zero.

No engine, no power steering, no power brakes, doing 70 with a fifth wheel behind us next to a busy onramp. I coasted it over, lane by lane, and got us onto the shoulder safely. That part still doesn’t feel real when I think back on it — it went about as well as it possibly could have, but it’s not a moment I want to repeat.

Once we were stopped I tried to restart it. It would crank — turn right over like normal — but it would not fire. No check engine light, nothing on the dash saying anything was wrong. Just a truck that cranked and cranked and never caught. After a handful of tries I made myself stop before I did nothing but kill the battery.

Called OnStar. They dispatched a tow for the truck and the trailer to the nearest dealership, Crain Buick GMC of Conway — thankfully only about 3 miles away — and told us to get an Uber and get our family off the highway rather than wait roadside during rush hour. Good advice; we took it. They quoted 45 minutes for the tow. It was two and a half hours before the truck actually showed up, trailer and all.

While we waited I called Ryan Bazil — my sales guy and a genuine friend, who sold me the truck back home at Weld County Garage in Greeley. He worked the phones with their service department to see what he could do from six hundred miles away, and then, on his own, called ahead to Crain to make sure we’d actually be taken care of once we got there. Above and beyond for a guy who’d already made his sale a year ago and owed us nothing more. Even the folks at Crain said as much when we arrived — that I had a really good sales guy going to bat for me like that.

Crain was fantastic about it. They were closing for the night when we rolled up, and the service manager, Trey, stayed open late just to get the truck checked in so it wasn’t sitting on a flatbed till morning. When we said we’d just walk to the hotel — it was only about half a mile — Trey wouldn’t hear of it and drove us there himself. We checked in and did what you do at the end of a day like that: ordered pizza and tried to relax.

I was back at the dealership early the next morning to meet the diesel tech. The truck had sat dead all night — between my restart attempts the evening before and the trailer hanging off the 7-pin all night, I imagine that finished off whatever charge was left. But with a charger on it, it fired right up without hesitation. They ran a full diagnostic and came back clean — no stored codes, nothing pointing at a real fault. Even the tracker I’ve got wired into the truck agrees — it logs everything continuously, and it never caught a real fault code at the moment things went sideways either. They floated the idea that a sensor could have briefly gone out of sync and caused it, but said that was unlikely given there wasn’t a single code to back it up. The one concrete thing they found was a battery testing borderline bad — possible culprit, in their read, but probably not the whole story either. They swapped it under warranty anyway, and we were back on the road.

We finished the rest of the trip without a single issue out of the truck. Whatever it was, it stayed gone. And between Trey at Crain and Ryan back in Greeley, it’s hard to feel too bad about a night that could’ve gone a lot worse.