Stephen G. Lowry
An electronic logging device, or ELD, is installed in a commercial truck to record how long a driver has been on the road. Not every truck has them – any truck manufactured before 2000 won’t have the system in place; neither will certain types of vehicles or short-haul trucks – but most commercial vehicles used for long-haul trucking have these devices.
ELDs are supposed to ensure that commercial drivers (and the companies which employ them) follow the federally-mandated Hours of Service (HOS) rules. HOS rules “refers to the maximum amount of time drivers are permitted to be on duty including driving time, and specifies number and length of rest periods, to help ensure that drivers stay awake and alert.” These rules were implemented for safety reasons: fatigued truck drivers are dangerous drivers, and companies can and do often push their drivers to the brink when it comes to delivering goods.
This is why a recent investigation by Freightwaves, a price reporting agency that deals exclusively with the global freight market, is so disturbing. Per their findings, “industry insiders are accusing some ELD vendors of exploiting flaws in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s technical specifications to let trucking companies and their drivers add ‘ghost co-drivers’ to skirt hours-of-service rules.”
What’s a ghost account/driver?
A ghost account is a “dummy” account created within a truck’s system that allows a company to “prevent unassigned driving time from building up in the system.” For example, say a company wants to run a road test for a new driver. The “ghost driver” would be logged into the system so that the ELD wouldn’t record the new driver’s road test as actual logged miles. There are perfectly legal reasons to use a ghost account – but avoiding HOS violations isn’t one of them.
How some ELD vendors are using their software to add more driver time
What ELD Rider is doing, according to Freightwaves, is creating fake drivers as a way to get around the HOS rules. A trucker told Freightwaves the following story (with corroborating video) about his experience with the ELD vendor:
Recently, a driver using ELD Rider software recorded a ghost co-driver being added to his device within 15-20 minutes after the driver contacted the company to request more hours….
At the time the U.S. driver contacted the ELD Rider representative in Serbia, the driver, who didn’t want to be named for fear of retaliation, had no drive time left on his clock and only 12 hours remaining on his 70-hour cycle before he was required by FMCSA to take a 34-hour reset.
He later received a call from ELD Rider confirming that the representative had edited the log to add a co-driver, often referred to as a ghost driver. The video then pans to the driver logging back into his device, showing that he now had almost 10 hours of drive time left in his day and around 68 hours remaining on his cycle before he must take 34 consecutive hours off duty before driving again.
This behavior, Freightwaves reports, has been going on since 2019.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is conducting an investigation, but it is likely to take a long time; ELD Rider is owned by LionEight LLC, which was once owned and operated by LionEight TMS LLC, but has been since sold off to Darex Solutions. In short, determining ownership and liability may be complicated, and the FMCSA has only just begun to ramp up its enforcement efforts against companies which skirt their regulations.
