Baek Barbé

The ELD mandate is one of the biggest changes to have come out of the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21), which was signed into law in 2012. It specifies that every commercial driver in America must now record their hours of service through electronic logging devices, as of December 16, 2019.

The ELD mandate comes straight from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Since it is relatively new, the approximately 3.5 million professional vehicle drivers in the United States are still learning what the rules mean in practice.

State to state, trucking is the most common job in the U.S. After all, it hasn’t been automated (yet) and will never be outsourced. As a result, the ELD mandate has a massive, nation-wide impact unlike any regulation in the past. Here’s a look at how the law works and what it means for vehicle drivers everywhere.

An Electronic Logging Device, or ELDs, is a tool to track a professional driver's Hours of Service in real time. Drivers won't have the option to forget or misplace their paperwork – instead, it will be automatically collected straight from their vehicle's engine.

An ELD device automatically records certain data elements at a set interval. These elements include date, location, time, engine hours, and vehicle miles, as well as identification information for the driver, vehicle, authenticated user, and motor carrier.