While driving to Martinsville VA. from south Florida this past week I was using the cruise control at 70mph and about 400 miles into the trip the truck felt like I tapped the brakes a couple of quick times and the ABS light came on, I stopped and checked all of the brakes with everything seemingly fine. The light was on after I restarted the truck but went out after a minute or two of driving so I again reset the cruise to 70mph and after a couple of minutes it felt like the brakes were tapped a couple of times and the ABS light came on, it stayed on until the remainder of the trip and went out only whenever we stopped for about an hour and a half for dinner and the light stayed off for the remainder of the weekend but I didn't use the cruise control for the weekend thinking maybe the hills had something to do with all of this.

On the return trip I started using the cruise control once we hit flat ground and everything worked great and just after entering Florida I tapped the brakes to released the cruise due to traffic and whenever I hit the 'Resume' switch the truck again surged and out of the corner of my eye I saw the speedometer wildly swing from the bottom of the scale to the proper speed in just a second and my front passenger said he thought all of the gauges in the truck did the same ... also the ABS light came on. I again tried the cruise and it seemed to work fine but for the remainder of the 200 mile trip I elected not use it and the ABS light stayed on for the rest of the trip.

'06 F250 with a 6.0 and 88,000 miles, the batteries were replaced about two weeks ago.

Easy fix?

 

The ABS light should mean there are codes in the ABS module. You'd need someone with a code reader capable of reading ABS codes to see them. They might be informative.

The gauge sweep, though, is an indication of the HEC (Hybrid Electronic Cluster) resetting itself. It normally does this when it's powered up after not having enough battery power to keep it's memory. That would make me wonder if you have a really low voltage situation or a broken or chafing wire somewhere.

The first thing I'd do is get a volt meter on there and see where you are with the key off, and with the engine running. The new batteries may be OK but you might have an alternator problem. If it's a wiring problem, that could get more tricky.