Red's ELD journey

Following up again, having gotten someone's attention on the 8/2 matter, with a somewhat nasty post on one of eRoad's Facebook PR announcements. Let's hope it actually gets considered and implemented.

The first reply was a statement like, "we know about it, but there isn't anything in the ELD mandate that requires a timer."

Before I could say wait, whut? Another email came saying she had sent my statement over to their engineering team as a feature request. LOL. Can't make this up.

Another round of exchanges, and this was my final statement. I deliberately crafted my language to stick with this being an important feature request versus the knee-jerk to call it what it is (someone who knows nothing about commercial driving trying to school a driver). Me attempting to catch more flies with honey.

 

I believe you are correct in there's some weird logic (I believed it corresponded to the 14 hour shift versus a calendar day) on the daily mileage total. I probably should have paid more attention, given on paper we were supposed to flag midnight in order to get a calendar day total. To be fair, that is what I was taught from others, not from reading the excruciating detail that is the FAR and interpreting it for myself. The latter I did not do. After several inspections with nothing being said about it, it never became something worth digging into.

I never gave it much attention on eRoad, maybe because the trip segment and service interval reports correctly. Within the vehicle profile there is a manual entry capability to enter odometer mileage in order to true up what is reported. The more data points that go in, the closer the reported mileage on a trip segment agrees with what's on the dash. Presumably it figures out the variance off of enough manual entries to apply across the board.

At least that's my story I'll be sticking to at audit or inspection time LOL.

 

Coincidentally my son's logging was a little dirty last week due to a stray automatic drive minute. He still thought he was right on hours. I'm actually going to have to print out 3 days of event logs to show him how the split didn't work that time. Since he was in a split that started with the 8, there was nothing on the display to help. Had it been working correct, he would have waited another 15 minutes and not logged any violation. Turned out to be a little learning moment for him too, as I discovered he understood the 8/2 but not 100%. Just like 90% of other drivers that use the split and can't really explain it well.

 

Now you got me curious to look back, to see if I can find some perspective for you. There is no violation indicator on the paper copy, and I swear the ELD on the truck had something like a caution indicator on the grid view, but it's been so long since I've violated (Nov last year) I can't remember. Of course you can't go back more than 8 days on the truck.

On the admin portal when viewing logs, a violation appears like this (in the grid part), however the printable copy does not have this. Presumably for audit purposes, so if those are supplied to an inspector they aren't getting their job done for them.



On the particular day pictured, there had been a bug that's been fixed since, where under certain circumstances that were not even involving an 8/2, timer activity would carry you right into violation despite never having driven at all with zeroes on the display. I know for sure it got me at least twice. This was the last time I actually saw it and could verify. Both times it got me on extraordinarily long (for me) driving days. This day I specifically remember backing into my space at the end of the day with 0:10 remaining on the display, but was in fact 10 min over my 14. After figuring out what was going on, from that day forward I make a mental note at what exact minute I start my 14 and track it manually as an added measure. Of course since then it hasn't happened again. To be fair, it's rare for me to log driving days that run to the limits, so fewer opportunities if that makes sense.

From the admin side, it's easy to find since there is a report for violations, which contains links so you can drill down and look at the day and analyze what happened. As I've looked back at our violations since nearly a year ago, about half were the bug I just described. I think that got fixed late Nov/early Dec last year.

Every other time were stray automatic drive events, that cannot be edited out of course. Sometimes it was maybe creeping around off duty and hitting a dip or a bump causing the ELD to see more than 5 mph for an instant. The new interpretation on personal conveyance will fix that for my operation. However there were two I know of that happened spontaneously while the truck did not move at all. In those cases, I (or my son) annotate the bogus drive time and complete the shift like it didn't happen, and disregard the reported violations as a result or extend a break if we can to prevent it. Within 24 hrs a proper break will occur and get it back on track.

 

What's weird in the grid I posted just now, is it shows a last modified time of today, around 8 hours ago. This is actually the grid for Oct 16 2017 LOL.