NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A congressional mandate that suspended parts of the hours-of-service rule until Sept. 30 required electronic logging device manufacturers to make costly adjustments and retests of their software for their customers.
A provision included in the $1 trillion omnibus bill signed into law in December suspended until Sept. 30 a requirement that drivers take off two consecutive periods of 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. during a 34-hour restart.
The law also required that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration provide Congress with an extensive study detailing the rule’s safety benefits.
Several ELD makers told Transport Topics that after the suspension provision was signed by President Obama they had to quickly make software changes to allow their customers to continue to be in compliance with the existing hours rule that became effective July 1, 2013.
“We tracked it, and we knew it was coming,” said Fred Fakkema, vice president of compliance with ELD manufacturer Zonar Systems. “We’re pretty agile in the things that we do. But at the same time, we had to change our whole system around, and then we had to do over-the-air updates.”
He added, “You pull out what you need to pull out, and then you have to do retesting to make sure that it works properly.”
Testing the revamped software was the longest part of the process, Fakkema said.
“We needed to tweak and test the software to reflect the change to the existing hours-of-service rule,” said Alexis Capelle, ELD program manager for Continental Commercial Vehicles & Aftermarket. “We actually needed to replace the entire ELD software module.”
Frank Lancaster, regional sales manager of Rand McNally’s mobile communications group, said the fact that the suspension did not include a requirement that drivers take a break before the first eight hours of driving time made the software changes more difficult.
“When they suspended the restart rule, they kept the eight-hour break,” said Frank Lancaster, regional sales manager of Rand McNally’s mobile communications group. “If they had taken the eight-hour break away, we could have just gone back to the old rule.”
It took a couple of weeks after the bill became law to adjust and test the software, Lancaster said.
Fakkema said Zonar representatives first got word Feb. 16 while attending American Trucking Associations’ Technology & Maintenance Council annual conference here that FMCSA planned to issue a final ELD rule in November.
“The biggest issue is retraining drivers and telling everybody on the 34-hour restart what the changes are,” said Fakkema, who added that Zonar has 350,000 ELD units deployed.
