Video shows ‘ghost co-driver’ added to trucker’s ELD to skirt HOS rules

This story is difficult to read as an industry outsider. Unless I’ve misread something, it reads like the driver management company is able to edit the logs in the software to alter driver history, allowing them to exceed drive time safety limits.<p>I can’t see any way this could happen without clear intent to break the laws. It’s also strange that it’s being done in a way that is plainly obvious to the trucker.

Everyone here is jumping to technical solutions... it&#x27;s far easier to fix this on the business side: Drivers are paid per mile. There&#x27;s an incentive to break the law. So... maybe start by outlawing a practice that incentivizes breaking the law and we wouldn&#x27;t have these issues.

I feel like this is a situation where the issues are both technical and political. If the system were technically designed correctly, they would need to put down verifiable details for who the other driver who allegedly drove the truck. This would be easily detectable, as a driver can&#x27;t be in two places at once etc. The other solution as one of the other commenters mentioned is essentially a physical tamper evident key that gets inserted into the recorder. Without a second key, there would be no way to operate the truck.<p>The other issue here is that it seems that the truck companies are given too much latitude to run their own monitoring systems. The monitoring should be done by&#x2F;through an entity that is incentivised to detect violations rather than cover them up.

The human driver time limits (real as well as regulatory) is why trucking will be enormously improved by self driving trucks, who can drive 24&#x2F;7

I thought this story was going to be about someone adding a dummy to the passenger seat to get into the HOV lane…

The TL;DR of that acronym soup is a story as old as the paper log books drivers used to use: log books are being faked, only instead of paper the <i>software vendor</i> apparently will fake your software log book for you.

ELD stands for &#x27;Electronic Logging Device&#x27;

Seems like WORM drives, and EU&#x2F;gov-operated cloud logging services should be a good mechanism for this. If you get audited, they check your vehicle against cloud logs - if they aren&#x27;t present, they request your WORM drive backup (a 3TB drive would last beyond the lifetime of a vehicle). If you can&#x27;t produce the backup log, your employer is fined.

The lack of accidents given widespread book-cooking here implies that the true level of safety is not where the current laws have been placed. Of course, one must account for additional violation if one were to put the safety limits closer to true safety limits, but perhaps the answer is that we&#x27;re lying to ourselves about what the safety limits should be.

this seems like a situation where audit logs would make regular tampering extremely obvious? is there just no oversight?

There&#x27;s a great book that came out recently covering in detail the various ways that truckers and trucking companies bypass the pervasive surveillance and regulation: Data Driven

&gt; …had no drive time left on his clock and only 12 hours remaining on his 70-hour cycle before he was required by federal law to take a 34-hour reset.<p>Umm, no.<p>They just had to take a 10 hour break and&#x2F;or wait until midnight to get more driving hours.<p>The only time you have to take a 34 hour break is if you burn out your hours because you either know you’re going to take a break (like going home) or you’re really bad at time management. You can run indefinitely if you manage your hours properly.<p>A couple times I had to perfectly time my start time so I would both run out of hours and get hours back at midnight to make it to the receiver 15 minutes late. Fun all around.<p>—edit—<p>Downvoters, tell me how I’m wrong.

Why are people messing with truckers? Truckers have it very rough right now, they want to drive, just let them work. Without truckers, America grinds to a halt.

Oh HN, how predictable you are.<p>&quot;You know what trucking really needs? Stricter solutions and harsher punishments! DRM in vehicles, so the government can electronically disable a car to prevent truckers from driving beyond the number of hours we agreed on! And lifetime trucking bans for trying to evade it!&quot;<p>You keep going down this route, and you&#x27;ll suddenly find yourself in a totalitarian society where breathing requires an X.509 cert.