Taking its cue from federal regulators, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) confirmed it will begin fully enforcing the electronic logging device (ELD) rule on Dec. 17, with no “soft enforcement” grace period.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) previously has stated there will be no grace period allowed for carriers that have been allowed to “grandfather in” to the ELD mandate — which went into effect on Dec. 18, 2017 — by having purchased and installed an automatic onboard recording device (AOBRD) before that date.
While FMCSA allowed for a three-month grace period – until April 1, 2018 – before it began placing trucks out of service for not having ELDs, CVSA inspectors will be providing no such leniency for the grandfathered AOBRD-ELD transition, the agency stated on Dec. 2.
“If a commercial motor vehicle driver is required to have an ELD and the vehicle is not equipped with a registered compliant ELD, the driver is considered to have no record-of-duty status,” CVSA stated. This also will apply to drivers still using an AOBRD after the Dec. 17 deadline.
CVSA, which is tasked with enforcing FMCSA regulations through roadside inspections, pointed out that according to the North American Standard Out-of-Service Criteria, “a property-carrying driver who does not have a record of duty status in his or her possession when one is required will be declared out of service for 10 hours and a passenger-carrying driver without a record-of-duty status when one is required will be placed out of service for eight hours.”
FMCSA mandated ELDs to make it easier to track, manage and share record-of-duty status as well as to improve highway safety and reduce crashes. The agency found that trucks equipped with ELDs had a 53% lower driving-related HOS violation risk and a 49% lower non-driving-related HOS violation risk than non-equipped trucks.
Unlike smaller fleets and independent owner-operators that made up the bulk of those buying ELDs to meet the 2017-18 deadlines, those grandfathering in to the rule have been predominantly large trucking companies that typically operate an average of 50 to 100 trucks.
According to the most recent FreightWaves survey, in partnership with CarrierLists and EROAD, only about 2% of carriers are still running AOBRDs ahead of the Dec. 17 deadline. This number has stayed the same the past several weeks, as revealed in prior surveys, signaling that most of the holdouts will wait until the last minute to make the switch.
