Tech Firms Plan to Meet With Government to Fine-Tune Requirements of EOBRs
By Dan Leone, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the Feb. 7 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
In the wake of a federal proposal to replace driver logbooks with electronic onboard recorders at most motor carriers, technology companies said they are preparing for another round of meetings with federal officials to fine-tune the technical requirements for these devices.
“What’s left out of this mandate is the whole discussion around performance specifications,” said Brian McLaughlin, chief operating officer of PeopleNet, Chaska, Minn.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration published some technical specifications for EOBRs last year, but the requirements are so new that neither technology companies nor end-users in the trucking industry understand exactly how the agency will interpret and enforce its own rules, McLaughlin said.
In a positive sign, “FMCSA has been open” with EOBR makers and has already “asked for our input,” McLaughlin told Transport Topics on Feb. 2.
PeopleNet is one of the three main providers of EOBRs in the country, along with Qualcomm Inc., the largest such provider, and Xata Corp.
Executives with all three companies said their first formal communication with FMCSA will take place in the form of public comments.
All three are also planning informal face-to-face discussions with federal safety officials who are slated to attend a meeting of the Technology & Maintenance Council’s EOBR task force, taking place this week in Tampa, Fla.
Last year, technology vendors headed up the trucking industry’s push to revise proposed federal technical specifications that, if left unchanged, would have added thousands of dollars to the per-unit cost of an EOBR.
The specifications, which have since been revised, were part of what some have called the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s “remedial mandate.” That rule, which went into effect last year, allowed FMCSA to mandate EOBRs for carriers with a history of HOS non-compliance.
The agency estimated that about 6,000 carriers would be ordered to use EOBRs as a result of the “remedial mandate.”
The rule that FMCSA proposed on Jan. 28, however, would require almost all interstate motor carriers — about 500,000 of them, by the agency’s count — to use EOBRs by 2015. Technology companies are therefore anticipating an explosion in orders.
“All of us providers will have to quadruple in size just to meet the demand,” said Christian Schenk, vice president of product marketing for Xata Corp., Eden Prairie, Minn.
Besides EOBR adoption, FMCSA’s latest proposal would also drive business for technology vendors by requiring trucking companies to more closely monitor their drivers’ hours of service compliance. That, a representative of Qualcomm Inc., means adopting more back-office software.
The FMCSA proposal that contains the blanket EOBR mandate also “establishes a framework where carriers now will have the responsibility for using an HOS management system,” said David Kraft, senior manager of government affairs for Qualcomm Inc. “This is not an EOBR, this is the backend systems and process to verify compliance information. That’s now defined in the rule, as opposed to being implicit.”
