Full ELD 5 mph question

Beyond that if you are in an area with poor cellular reception and are unable to transfer for that reason alone, there is no provision that exempts the driver from a violation.

 

Exactely. So if your in a Sprint zone good luck if your carrier is verizon. On Route 36 in Missouri there is a dead zone for 36miles if your Verizon contract or prepaid so hope you got Roaming

 

I did the physical installations myself so that I knew how these systems operated from front to back. After I installed around 36 devices, there was a big outage and I found out the vendor sent me devices with AT&T SIM cards when I had ordered Verizon. They could not send me new SIM cards, had to send all new devices. Let me tell you I was not very thrilled; I reinstalled them all.

 

Lot of good discussion in this thread. Here are a few refinements of some of the points or questions.

1) "Electronic transfer" has to be "capable" to be an ELD" but not necessary for AOBRD. This means that it can either transmit the last 8 days either via email or web-services. Or you can bluetooth it to them. Or he can hand you a USB stick to transfer them too. If you are out of cell signal many devices will show the officer that you have "queued" the transfer and it will occur when you are back in signal. Or you can use the USB stick method if you are out of signal. If all of that fails, then it states that you must at least be able to "provide either the display or printout" of your logs at roadside. Not all states support e-transfers yet and not all officers are trained on that one either. Naturally, some are...

2) You can not "undrive" miles that were driven in ELD mode. Your provider can make them go away if the device malfunctioned and they aren't real. You CAN reassign miles that were driven, like change them from "Driving" to "Personal Conveyance" or "Yard Move." You can also assign them to another person and take that drive/duty time off your logs.

3) Mechanics & Shops: you do not actually have to make a specific login for every mechanic or warehouse person, etc. There are multiple ways to treat that. If you have a mechanic that works for your company then he may very well get his own login. Or you can make a generic driver in the system called "Mechanic" for all other people. Or you can edit the drive time after the fact (as stated in paragraph 2 here) by reassigning the time and miles to a specific or a generic mechanic. I tend to like the method of making a generic mechanic (or yard mover) account and when I turn the truck over to that person I log the machine in as him. Then when you get the truck back, you log back in as you. It doesn't matter what they drove while they had it and you don't need to edit afterwards.

 

You must be able to transfer and display at sametime. They ask for a transfer so they can print a copy of your last 8 days for whatever reason evidence in case you challenge the citatation etc. So better hope those using tablets have a good wifi signal if not you technically can be shut down. It no different than not provide documents for insurance or Registration.

 

The yard move isn't assigned to anyone, so may show up, but because it was not logging that move to any particular driver, it will not go against the driver who logs in as the driver in my trucks. Maybe you guys should look at other eld systems and get one that works better than whatever you are using.

 

Garmin Elogs lets the owner set up the parameters.
If my mechanics, yard girl, me, or whoever jumped in the truck and moved it under 10 kms/hr it doesn't show up as moved...if we do say hit 15 kms/hr and trigger it, it wouldn't matter because they don't have a tablet with the software downloaded and it turned on, so the garmin gizmo under the dash has nothing to log the move to. Basically anyone and everyone can move a truck in my yard, including my 14 year old yard girl, its my property and she has my permission to. She is the most likely person to be moving the trucks actually. But because she doesn't have a tablet with the software like my drivers, it was as if it never happened. If you drive for someone else who didn't set it up that way, or maybe use a brand of eld that would not let you choose the options you want, then sure it will work however they set it up.
I find garmin to work great, allow customized settings, and when the driver takes their tablet out of the truck and walks away, it loses connectivity, until it comes back, or another device is in the truck for it to connect to. I like to test things out before I go all in...so i bought one garmin on Amazon just to try it in one truck, and I had the only tablet that would connect with it. I tried it out, and I am old and very bad with technology, yet even I found it simple to use...i used it for a few months and really liked it, so then ordered a bunch more, and more tablets. We are allowed to use paper logs here still, but I much prefer the garmin eld to the paper books i used for over 3 decades. Heck if you want to be lazy you can not even set it to drive time, just have the tablet in the truck and hit the road and it will do so automatically. Stop for lunch, just take the tablet with you into the restaurant and it automatically goes to off duty because you broke their connection when you walked away with the tablet in your hand. Garmin has no silly monthly fee to pay either. $250 Canadian, pay once and done. Bring your tablet in at night and recharge it is what I do. It will take you about 5 minutes to set it up initially, 10 if you are electronically challenged like me. I've heard the horror stories from others about some brands, so avoided them, heard good about the garmin, so got it.

 

Eld is not a solution to anything. It is a tool used for efficiency. That is all. Only the brokers, and manufacturing business benefits from ELD. I would like to hear of drivers, or carriers that have increased revenue from this malarchy.