Sikh-American truck drivers urge Trump to delay ELD rule

Washington, August 16

A group representing the Sikh-American truck drivers has urged US President Donald Trump to delay the enforcement of a regulation which mandates them to install expensive logging devices on their vehicles.

The new regulation, to be effective from December 18, will require almost all commercial trucks, unless a truck is in an exempted class, to buy and operate an Electronic Logging Device (ELD) to record the hours they are on and off duty.

An ELD synchronises with a vehicle engine to automatically record driving time, for more accurate hours of service recording.

Industry reports say a wide range of prices exist for different versions of the technology, running from USD 165 to USD 832 annually, the most widely used being USD 495 a truck.

The Sikhs Political Action Committee said the new rules carried a price tag of USD 2 billion and are “not adequately developed for reliability” under mandatory conditions.

“Please save the livelihood of small businesses and truck drivers from the mandate of the Electronic Logging Device (ELD) rule,” Gurinder Singh Khalsa, chairman of the PAC, said.

Khalsa said the federal bureaucracy seemed bogged down to think that more regulations would solve problems on highways.

“In fact, the ELDs are counterproductive and do nothing to improve highway safety,” he said in a letter to Trump on August 14, urging him to delay its implementation “until reasonable solutions can be worked out”, according to a press release by the group.

A large number of truck drivers in the US are of Sikh origin and many of them work in small business enterprises in the trucking industry. PTI