Were Tachographs used in trucking in the US?

Big Brother Is Watching! Sangamo Tachograph

 

I was talking to my oldest son (20) who is out in Texas helping on a silage chopping crew.
He’s running a 1985 359 that came out of California a number of years ago.
He said, “It has this funny square clock/speedometer/odometer thing on the dash, what is it?
Blew his mind when I told him what it was for.

 

I highly doubt it.

 

Matlack had them in their trucks when I started with them in 1996.

They put the Qualcomms in the trucks around late '97/early '98.

Our TM told us to quit using the tachographs then, although I heard some terminals used them long after that.

Used to have to turn tacho card in with your log sheet. It basically served as a check on your logging.

 

I never saw one in real life, just some old B&W video or TV where drivers were wearing those hats

 

There were many old trucks that had two of them on the dash. One was for the truck and the other for the driver. Back in those days even without A/C trucks were never shut down much. So total running daily hours were graphed on one by engine revs. This also graphed driver habits of shift points, lugging events, and over speeds. The other one just graphed miles driven, mph, travel time, etc.

Both my dad and grand dad told me stories about how drivers would during the winter months leave trucks idling all night in front of there houses during the week from time off to time on the next morning. Back in those days after WW2 no one was bothered by that. It was just what working men did. no one was a Karen and everybody just did what they had to do.