Zonar

So my company just installed this Zonar on all our trucks... I'm sure it was something that our new, young, safety manager (with little if any on the road experience, not even sure he has a CDL) pushed for... Any guesses on what company employed him previously???

The CoPilot GPS is garbage, luckily I knew we were getting new systems so I already had my own RM 740.

The stupid RFID tags that you have to scan kinda suck... Just because it makes me feel that my word isnt good enough. And less than a week of using it and I've had to manually override it because one tag wouldn't scan.

The Zonar Logs arent all that bad. But I find it to be very lacking in what info is viewable while driving... It only shows you how much time is left before you need a 30 min or 10 hr break. The only way to see your 11 and 14 hr clocks is to be stopped. This isnt a huge deal, but would be nice to be able to see the 11 and 14 hr clocks while I'm driving. Cause if my 11 or 14 is even 1 min longer than my 8 hr clock it only tells me (while driving) I need a 30 min break.... Now if my 11 was say 25 mins longer than my 8, this could play a huge roll in where I stop for the day. But if I can't see that info while driving so I can crunch the numbers to see where I could make it to (should I pull off the interstate to a TS and end my day, or continue to that small rest area with no toilets to do a 30 min then use that 25 extra mins to get to the next TS)

I thought the dash cam would bother me... But thus far the only times ive set it off, it was snowing like a ####### and, it thought I was drifting out of my lane.

So can anyone give me some input about thier recent experiences with the Zonar system?

 

I dealt with it at Public Works. Our operators would often just scan the pucks and not actually inspect anything... you could always tell by how quickly they'd have them all scanned.
The newer ones use a tablet, and they seemed to have to update fairly often, which could be a pain if you didn't have a good data connection. The ones they had also required you to have a card which you'd scan in with.
Compared to the Qualcomm/Omnitracs systems that I'd dealt with before, I think the interface was more user-friendly, and if you had access, you could log in from any computer, instead of having to have software installed on a computer, so when we had to go hunt vehicles down, it made it a lot easier. Or, for road calls, I could look up the unit location on the Zonar website, then send it to my phone via Google, whereas the Qualcomm system I'd dealt with didn't have that concise realtime location feature.
As for features specific to an OTR fleet, I wouldn't know. I'd imagine there has to be some which Public Works vehicles would have no use for and wouldn't have.

 

Knight was my first company. Last three months i was there they stiffed me on layover and lumper pay.

I started manually overriding ALL the checkpoints at the start of my pre-trip, then I would walk around the truck without the tablet.

At that point I didn’t care anymore what they thought about me, but I did that for three months and never heard a word back from them for all my blatant overriding.

 

Knight has long standing history of stealing payroll

 

There is only one puck you scan now to start the pretrip and it's inside the cab.