ELD mandate is coming up quick. If it doesn’t get stopped by OOIDA then we will all have ELDs in the truck. Many people are selling great products. The FMCSA basically states that every long haul truck driver has to have one of these things. Unless:
- Drivers who use paper logs no more than 8 days during any 30-day period.
- Driveaway-towaway drivers (transporting an empty vehicle for sale, lease, or repair).
- Drivers of vehicles manufactured before model year 2000.
** From the FMCSA website page – FMCSA – ELD Rule Exceptions
The ELD requires that you have a smartphone app or some other type of device that accomplishes the same thing and a piece of hardware connected to the truck. The piece of equipment is basically a GPS transponder that is recording information from the truck. It can tell how fast and when you are moving. Can tell everything about your engine and links all electronic sensing that you can have on your truck. The technology has tons of benefits and is going to change the trucking industry faster than anything else. It will revolutionize the way people do business and are able to connect with the people that have freight much easier. It will enable any trucking company to do business with any shipper. The bigger companies used to have an advantage over disconnected smaller companies because they had GPS. This advantage is gone overnight. I kinda think that bigger companies want to ELD to become a mandate and organizations like OOIDA are fighting it.
Many feel, including me, that it may be an overreach of the government but ELDs will make trucking so much better. Think about how amazing parking applications already are. Ties this into your ELD and the phone now can route your trip directly to a parking app that has space available. Maybe even give you a couple of options for services at each one and pre load fuel prices and discounts from your fuel card. That seriously just saved the truck driver like 30 min and probably 2 hours of stress thinking about actually having to figure out where to stop and rest or fuel.
It can figure out where to fuel and drive to save you the most money. Imagine if the routing app could tell you the most fuel efficient route based on elevation and also find the cheapest gas prices to fuel up. The computers can figure out if it is better to run the tank all the way down to a few gallons or fill up now. If you put this with some automated capabilities and the stress level of a Truck Driver went down by like 50%.
The ELD mandate and for trucks ELD compliance – ELD Checklist for Drivers