ELD ROULETTE

ELD Roulette: “I’m not worried: my carriers are compliant and the mandate will probably be delayed!” Not so fast!  

If you’re not worried, you should be. Even if all of your carriers really are compliant, they will still be fielding a gold rush of calls from other shippers whose carriers aren’t.  In brief: the ELD Mandate requires all commercial motor vehicles to be equipped with technology which tracks drivers’ hours of service before December 18, 2017. ELDs replace paper logs, which are fraught with errors. Despite having 3 years notice, many experts estimate that nearly 50% of all commercial motor vehicles still haven’t met the ELD requirement, a mere four months from the mandate. Every buyer of freight will be impacted if even a small portion of those currently noncompliant carriers choose to leave the industry. And compliant carriers lush with load offers will likely give their trucks and drivers to the highest bidders.

When the mandate takes effect, two things are certain. First, many carriers won’t be ready, and will be placed out of service until they become compliant. That means other shippers and brokers will pay top dollar to steal your carriers and your capacity from you. Secondly, experts who are studying the impact of converting paper logs to ELDs find some fleets are driving 100-120 additional miles per day! That’s nearly 20% excess/illegal hours. If 50% of fleets lose 20% of miles, it’s as if 10% of the nation’s capacity disappears. Even if it’s only 5%, it’s a heck of a lot worse of an impact than the 2003-2004 crisis, when hours of service were reduced.

A challenge to delay the ELD mandate failed in the U.S. Supreme Court in June. A bill was introduced in the House of Representatives (HR 3282) which is designed to delay the mandate. The bill does not have support of house or committee leadership, and there’s no support in the Senate. To put it simply: it’s doomed to fail. Planning a business around a delayed ELD mandate is a fool’s game.