iTECH: New Rules Mandate EOBR Devices That Don’t Yet Exist

By Dan Leone, Staff Reporter

This article appears in the August/September issue of iTECH, published in the Aug. 9 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

If your fleet uses electronic driver logs and plans to buy trucks after June 4, 2012, be sure to tell your company’s chief technology officer ahead of time. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has decreed that all trucks manufactured after that date must use a new type of electronic onboard recorder — a type that doesn’t exist yet.

The good news, suppliers told iTECH, is that with a minimum of tinkering and a few software updates, many of the hours-of-service recording devices currently in use could morph into the kind of system that FMCSA wants to see in trucks minted on June 5, 2012, and later.

The bad news is that certain other devices cannot be upgraded.

While some wiggle room exists for continued use of older recorders, eventually, as carriers replace trucks, they also will have to buy new onboard computers — or at least modify the ones they already have.

Of course, carriers cannot buy what isn’t for sale.

“There’s no device out there right now that would meet all the specifications for an EOBR,” said Tom Cuthbertson, director of industry solutions at Xata Corp., Eden Prairie, Minn.

The current crop of federally approved e-logging devices is officially known as “automatic onboard recording devices,” or AOBRDs. The technical standard is more than 20 years old, and the latest off-the-shelf systems from manufacturers such as Qualcomm, Xata and PeopleNet all comply with it. Not until the April publication of the new rule did FMCSA codify the definition of “EOBR.” The term informally entered the trucking industry’s lexicon years ago.

Among the systems that could be stripped of their application as legal hours-of-service recording tools is the grandfather of truck-based computers, Qualcomm Inc.’s OmniTRACS.

“We expect that our [OmniTRACS] customers will upgrade to other hardware after June 2012 to maintain or initiate their use of electronic driver logs,” said David Kraft, Qualcomm’s senior manager of government affairs.

Still, thanks to the grandfather clause in FMCSA’s April rule, Qualcomm customers will be able to hang on to their OmniTRACS units for years beyond the 2012 deadline. EOBRs installed in trucks built before that date have to meet only the agency’s old technical requirements.

Werner Enterprises, one of the nation’s largest truckload carriers, is among the trucking companies holding its breath on technology procurement during FMCSA’s grace period.

“The rules are not finalized at this point, so it’s difficult to predict the final workload required,” said Mary Kaye Howe, Werner’s associate vice president of management information system.

As Howe sees it, Werner has two options: “either adapting our current system to the new requirements or . . . [making] an educated decision on the various vendor products that may be available to meet those same requirements.”

Electronic logging is old hat for Werner. The carrier rolled out e-logs 12 years ago. The technology was then so novel in the trucking industry that Werner’s marketing people adopted it as a recruiting tool. Some Werner trailers still bear decals that read, “No more paper logs!”

Werner’s system relies on onboard systems from Qualcomm — mostly OmniTRACS — to track a truck’s movements over the road. The resulting position and timing data are fed into software that Werner developed internally and used to compile an accurate driver log.

East of Omaha, longtime Qualcomm customer Schneider National Inc., a Green Bay, Wis., truckload hauler that is even larger than Werner, hedged its position in onboard technology against regulatory obsolescence by instituting a wholesale rip-and-replace of all its OmniTRACS units.

Schneider began that work last year, well in advance of the final publication of the EOBR rule, when it announced that it would install Qualcomm’s newest onboard system, the MCP 200, fleetwide.

Schneider’s installation remains a work in progress, but it is slated to be completed before FMCSA draws the curtains on the old AOBRD standard in the summer of 2012.

Even in a best-case scenario, a pre-emptive strike such as Schneider’s only will reduce, not eliminate, the tinkering that will have to be done to meet the new EOBR standard.

FMCSA’s new rule, in its present form, contains two specifications that technology suppliers, and trucking industry trade associations, have petitioned the agency to reconsider. One specification deals with USB (universal serial bus) connectivity; the other specifies the range of temperatures in which compliant EOBRs must be able to operate.

Members of this supplier/advocate coalition met with FMCSA on June 2, and some participants, including Qualcomm, Xata and PeopleNet, Minnetonka, Minn., told iTECH that they came away from the meeting with the impression that FMCSA would heed the industry’s pleas for more reasonable technical specifications.

The agency declined to comment on any possible changes to the regulation, or to discuss the June meeting with trucking industry representatives.

If the coalition has its way, its members said, the costliest, most labor-intensive EOBR changes that FMCSA set out in the new rule could be averted.

However, even if the group gets everything on its regulatory wish list, certain onboard systems still will be incompatible with the latest tech specs, necessitating new procurement at some trucking companies.

As Brian McLaughlin, chief operating officer of PeopleNet, put it, “We’re at the end of life of some very good systems.”

OmniTRACS is not the only hardware, or indeed the only type of hardware, that will be drastically affected by the new federal regulation.

Rand McNally, Skokie, Ill., markets a personal navigation device for truckers, called IntelliRoute TND. Unique among truck-specific PNDs, the TND includes what Rand McNally calls an “hours-of-service timer.” A driver can activate the timer when he goes on duty and pause it when he pulls off the road.

This HOS “timer” would fail to pass muster with FMCSA under either the new or old technical specifications, but Rand McNally already has marked up a to-do list to bring the TND series into compliance with the new rule.

They’ve even crossed one item off that list: the ability to integrate directly with a truck’s engine.

Rand McNally accomplished that functionality through its TrueTrack system, a fleet management system in which a TND device is only one part. TrueTrack includes a piece of hardware that plugs into a truck’s engine control module at one end and into a TND personal navigation device at the other. Add to the equation a few software tweaks and the TND-based TrueTrack system could be brought into compliance with the latest EOBR rule, Rand McNally said.

That kind of tweaking could become common between now and the rule’s effective date, especially since FMCSA’s latest technical requirements go a few paces beyond the old AOBRD specification.

“The new specs will apply to you whether or not you’ve been forced to put in the system,” said Richard Reiser, Werner’s vice president of government relations. “If you’re voluntarily running EOBRs, you have to meet those specs.”