On Monday, December 18, the drivers of many if not most heavy duty commercial vehicles will be required to have a functional electronic logging device (ELD) with them in the cabs of their trucks.
It’s not like they weren’t warned. The ELD mandate from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has been years in the making. In June, we published a comprehensive Special Report on the law, Scramble or Gamble. And we followed that with an update in late November.
Most big highway-haul fleets are wired up and ready as the law was designed to prevent these types of long-haul drivers from fudging paper log books and driving while tired. But some independents, smaller operators and construction vocational fleets are still unprepared, or scrambling now to find and set up an ELD system before December 18.
“There is a lot of panic buying,” says Josh DeCock, product management director, Pedigree Technologies. “We have partners who say their customers are going to wait to see how seriously the FMCSA is about enforcing it and if there are big fines. If there are not big fines they may wait until April or May.”
So, some are scrambling and some are gambling. And that doesn’t mean there aren’t penalties for not having an ELD. According to our sister publication Commercial Carrier Journal:
The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, which is made up of enforcement officials and meant to provide uniformity in enforcement of trucking and bus regulations, says it has notified the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration of its plan to begin citation enforcement December 18 and out-of-service enforcement in April.
