The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance’s announcement of the availability of this year’s updated edition of its out-of-service criteria handbook noted the addition of criteria related to electronic logging devices. Unlike for other updates, however, the alliance didn’t spell out what those additions were.
None are new out-of-service conditions, perhaps the reason they weren’t directly shared. Rather, they’re footnotes related to current out-of-service conditions having to do with the hours of service themselves, namely having no logbook, having no previous seven days of logs, and presenting a false log, all of which call for an out-of-service declaration for the driver in force for 10 consecutive hours.
Here’s how they’re written (italics), with my notes following each (and for clarity’s sake, none of these apply if you’re otherwise exempted from using and ELD, whether you’ve got a pre-2000 model year truck or are running under short-haul exceptions to the hours of service or another exemption):
Footnotes related to ELDs; all go in force on December 18, 2017, if nothing changes:
**If a driver/carrier is using an electronic logging device that is not authorized by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration per 395.22(a), the driver/carrier is considered to have no record of duty status.
So this one would be the equivalent of having no logbook at all, if the driver/carrier isn’t using an ELD on the FMCSA’s device registry – 10 hours out of service, as noted above. There’s a wrinkle in this one, though, given FMCSA’s grandfather period for current-generation Automatic Onboard Recording Devices (AOBRDs). As I wrote in the intro to our April ELD market guide: “At this stage, part of the complexity involving the registry is that automatic onboard recording devices meeting fairly minimal requirements compared to ELD specs are essentially grandfathered through Dec. 16, 2019. The [ELD mandate] rule notes that any carrier installing an AOBRD prior to this year’s ELD enforcement date can use that device until the 2019 date. Practically, what that means is that enforcing the requirement to use a registry-listed device is unlikely before that time, particularly for carriers who comply with the ELD rule and install an engine-connected e-log prior to Dec. 18. So the registry’s importance for carriers choosing ELDs at this stage is minimal.”
If placed out of service for this one prior to 2019, and you have proof you were using an engine-connected e-log prior to Dec. 18 this year, you may have cause for a challenge to remove it from your record. At once, I suspect most well-known ELD providers are likely to be on the registry prior to December.
**If a driver is unable to produce or transfer the data from an automatic on-board recording device or electronic logging device to an authorized safety official as required by 395.15(b) or 395.24(d), the driver is considered to have no record of duty status.
Again, no log book, 10 consecutive hours out of service. Though the FMCSA hasn’t rolled out the data-transfer software to states yet, the process is under way. We’ll be updating you on what you can expect in this department in the July issue. Preliminary conversations with state enforcement officials lead me to the conclusion that the ELD’s display and/or ability to print will be key in a lot of log checks, unless violations are found, at least initially. So during roadside stops you’ll likely be handing your device to officers in many states — or if you’re utilizing the Continental VDO RoadLog, printing your logs for them. A lot of states are already accepting log data via officers’ email, so that backstop process for most devices, too, may stand in for FMCSA’s central emailing system if it’s not in place everywhere before the end of the year.
