In the mailbag podcast above, three views of the ELD mandate show the strong opposition felt among many in Overdrive‘s audience, with more than one of the callers noting the sense of freedom that being an owner-operator has traditionally entailed as under attack.
Those opposed to the mandate will be happy to hear that the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association’s moves to push against the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s final rule have begun with Friday’s filing in the federal 7th Circuit court of a petition for review.
We’ll continue to follow developments on the legal front. Meantime, more here on the unexpected “silver lining” in the rule, if you can call the pre-2000 model year truck exception that.
According to Overdrive‘s sister company RigDig Business Intelligence, which among other things measures the size and other characteristics of the population of Class 8 trucks on the road today by looking at just what vehicles have been inspected or involved in a reportable crash, among other data, pre-2000 model year trucks make up a fairly small percentage of the total number of trucks hauling freight of any kind today. The raw number of such trucks, around 243,000, is just 15 percent of the total trucks shown as active in RigDig’s customary 24-month lookback.
As has been suggested by no small number of readers, in some owners’ efforts to avoid having to comply with electronic-log use, assuming the rule makes it to fruition over the next few years, those older trucks could be increasingly valuable pieces of equipment.
