CVSA Director Talks ELDs, Enforcement, and the Future

Mooney spoke about the disconnect between how trucking companies view some of the Alliance's enforcement and what the CVSA is actually trying to accomplish. Photo: CVSA

Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance Executive Director Collin Mooney gave a wide-ranging interview with Canadian trucking publication Today's Trucking, talking about how he views the organization's role in improving safety on our roads.

Mooney spoke about the disconnect between how trucking companies view some of the Alliance's enforcement and what the CVSA is actually trying to accomplish. He found that the rollout of the ELD mandate in December from an enforcement perspective has not gone completely according to plan.

“We are disappointed that our implementation process — our delay in implementing Out-of-Service conditions until April 1 — has been taken by many in the industry as the new implementation date. That wasn't the intent,” said Mooney. “I'm disappointed in the handful of people electing to install their ELDs so they meet the regulatory definition, but then still using paper. It's not meeting the regulatory intent.”

<img src="http://www.automotive-fleet.com/fc_images/news/m-collin-mooney-372x400.jpg" border="0" alt="

Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance executive director Collin Mooney. Photo: CVSA

On the subject of Out of Service violations, Mooney reflected on how the kinds of violations found during inspections often point to larger problems with carriers and how they might be failing to enforce their own safety rules.

“If we're finding violations and documenting them at roadside, you have a failure within your annual inspection program, your preventive maintenance program, your driver trip inspection program,” he said. “Sometimes [truckers] rely on the roadside inspection program as their preventive maintenance program. We see that a lot, and that's not right. The carriers that invest in a preventive maintenance program are at a competitive disadvantage when you have motor carriers that do not.”

Mooney also discussed the influx of new technologies ...Read the rest of this story

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Embark’s Self-Driving Truck Goes L.A. to Florida in Latest Journey

Embark's self-driving truck just completed a five-day, 2,400-mile journey across the U.S. Photo: Embark

Autonomous vehicle technology company Embark has completed a 2,400-mile, coast-to-coast journey in one of its self-driving trucks.

The journey began in Los Angeles, with the truck traveling along Interstate 10, one of the country's busiest freight corridors. It ended five days later in Jacksonville, Florida. The company said the journey helps prove that mapping out long-distance trips is not a barrier for self-driving trucks.

Since last year, the San Francisco-based startup has been running its self-driving Class 8 trucks on routes between Los Angeles and El Paso, transporting products on a limited basis for the manufacturing company Electrolux. But this latest journey is much longer, a significant milestone for the company, which envisions future where autonomous trucks can increase efficiency by running long-haul routes 24 hours a day.

“When we announced our Los Angeles to El Paso route we promised that was the just first stage of a much larger expansion,” said Alex Rodrigues, Embark CEO. “The coast-to-coast demonstration we completed today is four times longer than our El Paso route, which was already the longest in the world.”

Currently, Embark's trucks have a professional driver in the cab as a safety measure, actively monitoring the road, supervising the system and ready to take over control when needed. Because the driver was constricted by hours-of-service rules, the trip took longer than it would have had it been able to run without those limitations.

Once Embark's tech is ready and cleared to run on its own, Embark expects the trip to take only two days in total, according to TechCrunch, which also reported that the truck went "hours at a time with no disengagements, and when they did occur they were usually only a few seconds," according to Embark CEO ...Read the rest of this story