“This was just to minimize loss and theft,” says Benjamin Ramsay, vice president of technology for the Indianapolis-based truckload carrier. Ramsay is also co-founder of ELDRatings.com, a website that provides expert guidance and user reviews of ELDs.
“Looking back, I’m not sure how much difference it really made on that front, so in hindsight I might have valued the freedom to roam a little more highly,” he says.
The benefits of a mobile ELD platform, he explains, are having drivers take pictures of defects for vehicle inspections and capturing images of proof-of-delivery documents. The same mobile hardware could also support signature capture or accident reporting, among other functions, he says.
Drivers could have visibility to their hours-of-service duty status and log “on duty” to attend a safety meeting as well. While there are benefits for having mobile ELDs there are also tradeoffs to consider.
Working outside the cab
When the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration published the final ELD rule in December, 2016, it required certain data fields to be automatically recorded whenever a driver changed duty status. This could only be done using ELD that have a connection to the vehicle’s databus.
