ELD mandate did make trucking safer, but not the way it was intended
Sometimes all it takes is the addition of one small variable to spur evolution. For humans, it’s theorized that harnessing fire catalyzed positive social and dietary changes in our prehistoric ancestors, leading to tight-knit tribes and bigger brains. Or maybe it was aliens, as ancient astronaut theorists believe. Whatever it was, we’re here and we do one thing—and do it better than most species: consume. And among humans, nobody does it better than Americans.
That’s good for trucking, as the industry accounts for more than 70% of the transported goods people consume. But the speed and cost at which freight is delivered is never fast or cheap enough. After all, if things cost less and arrive sooner, we can consume more of them.
But trucks are driven by humans (for now) who need to rest. They also need money, and make more the less they rest. (Time is money.) Going coast to coast on copious amounts of coffee and a few hours of sleep leads to accidents, though.
Thankfully, the government was there to help and mandated electronic logging devices (ELDs) on over-the-road trucks. Now Uncle Sam (aka, your dad’s Big Brother) could track drivers’ nap times and eliminate truck crashes. OK, it’s the government, so that last bit didn’t happen. From 2016 to 2021, when ELD adoption was growing (with full compliance hitting in Dec. 2019), the accident rate increased by 6%, according to NHTSA’s CRSS data.
To be fair, FMCSA estimated that only 1,844 crashes, 562 injuries, and 26 deaths would be prevented from ELDs. However you feel about ELDs, though, they are now on more than 3 million commercial trucks. And with them came a massive wave of telematics devices to wirelessly send the Hours of Service data back to the fleet. And with that, the data revolution in trucking caught fire.
Over the last decade, the telematics revolution has given fleets the ability to send sensor data from engines, tires, trailers and more from the vehicle to fleet management systems, giving the back office insights into real-time asset health and driver behavior. At a minimum, this transparency positively impacts safety and fuel consumption.
More recently, adding remote diagnostics and data analytics (being fed historical DTC and repair info) to the mix allows fleets and OEs to perform predictive maintenance. A maintenance platform using this technology can compare the current faults on a truck to those from the past. If the fault code data coming from a specific make and model matches up to what historically has caused a derate in 80% of similar cases, the fleet owner would know to have the driver pull into a shop ASAP.
This may truly be the best legacy of the ELD mandate and onset of telematics, because predictive maintenance is like having your very own PreCrime Division, like in “Minority Report.” Instead of preventing murders, you’re predicting when something will kill your truck’s uptime. And you don’t even have to wrestle with ethical questions regarding free will and determinism to do it.
Once you find the right provider, integrate your data, and train up your people, (not easy feats), you are pretty much ready to hunt down suspected issues before they bring down your assets. This in turn raises availability.
“You’re essentially getting more vehicles for free for the cost of the vehicles you already have,” Uptake CEO Adam McElhinney shared at Geotab Connect 2025.
With skyrocketing truck costs due to new technology and tariffs, getting more with less does help the bottom line.
But the evolution doesn’t stop there, as it won’t be long before condition-based maintenance (CBM), which relies more on real-time data, hits the maintenance sector. With sensors added to the brakes and rest of the wheel end, fleets are finding new ways to keep the trucks rolling reliably and much safer. If early projections are correct, fleets will save millions of dollars avoiding road calls and extended downtime while also optimizing scheduled maintenance and parts delivery.
According to Andreas Bohman, global product line manager for connected technologies at SKF, the TraX Wheel End Monitor, which alerts fleets to thermal events, has caught at least 10 issues, such as bearing failures, that would cause serious damage. He noted unplanned maintenance costs upwards of four times as much as planned service.
“If ignored, these can lead to expensive repairs or, in the worst case, a wheel-off situation,” Bohman said.
He also noted tanker fleets hauling fuel used TraX to detect multiple high-temp events. In the case of an LNG tanker, a thermal event can spark a $1 million cost. Instead, the driver pulled over and averted the crisis.
“The intense heat generated by the dragging brake could have quickly led to component seizure, a potential tire blowout, or worse—ignition,” Bohman said.
He noted “brake health monitoring is definitely the next frontier” and it’s starting to gain traction. Combined with TPMS and wheel-end data, this omniscient look at axle-level health serves as an early warning system for wheel-offs and brake fading. If adopted at scale, this will likely save far more lives than the 26 that ELDs are thought to prevent. And that's just one of hundreds of examples of truck and trailer "smart" parts making the roads safer everyday.
In the end, government intervention accidentally did what it set out to do. Who could have predicted that?
