Trucking Safety Crisis: How ELD Self-Certification is Killing People
SummaryView Transcript Mark Hazelwood breaks down the dangers of unchecked ELD self-certification and the surge of non-domiciled drivers, arguing these factors are not only distorting freight markets but also contributing to highway fatalities. He explains why US enforcement needs to catch up to Canada’s third-party certification model and the huge economic ripple effects for carriers […] The post Trucking Safety Crisis: How ELD Self-Certification is Killing People appeared first on FreightWaves
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6}#fwtv_zrZtjh56FzM. fwtv-panel p{margin:0 0 12px}#fwtv_zrZtjh56FzM. fwtv-transcript p{margin:0 0 12px}SummaryView TranscriptMark Hazelwood breaks down the dangers of unchecked ELD self-certification and the surge of non-domiciled drivers, arguing these factors are not only distorting freight markets but also contributing to highway fatalities.
He explains why US enforcement needs to catch up to Canada’s third-party certification model and the huge economic ripple effects for carriers and drivers. This is a must-watch for anyone concerned about the future of trucking safety and fair competition.
The United States has 1,020 electronic logging device providers on the market compared to just 42 in Canada — a disparity that Mark Hazelwood, chairman of Assured Telematics, Conversion Interactive, and Echo Flaps, says is a direct consequence of a self-certification system that has allowed carriers and drivers to manipulate hours-of-service data with near impunity.
The current administration is moving toward mandatory third-party ELD certification, a shift Hazelwood said could take at least 12 months to implement even under the best circumstances. The stakes are not abstract.
Non-domiciled CDL holders grew from roughly 170,000 when President Trump left office in January 2020 to 780,000 when he returned in January 2025, Hazelwood said.
Many of those drivers, he argued, obtained credentials through CDL mills that issued licenses within two to three days without adequate training, then used manipulated ELDs to log 140,000 to 150,000 miles annually — compared to the 92,000 to 96,000 miles a properly hours-of-service-compliant driver can legally run. “They’re killing people.
They’re killing people. And you have innocent Americans on the highway, and they’re driving in Florida, California, wherever, Indiana, Pennsylvania, where a state trooper was killed, and they’re being killed by these illegals driving trucks that have not been trained to drive trucks.”
Hazelwood said the enforcement effort underway by DOT Secretary Sean Duffy and FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs — which has already pulled more than 20,000 drivers out of service and canceled 28,000 illegal CDLs — may not be large enough on its own to move the capacity market, but that the threat of third-party certification could accelerate the exit of non-compliant ELD providers.
“My guess is if we could get that done over the next 12 months, I think it would be a heroic act,” he said. Assured Telematics spent millions of dollars becoming the first ELD provider certified under Canada’s third-party regime, which has been in place since 2019.
On the capacity side, Hazelwood said the driver math amplifies the effect of enforcement: removing one non-domiciled driver effectively removes 1. 5 drivers’ worth of miles from the market, because each non-domiciled driver is running roughly 50,000 more miles per year than a legally operating counterpart.
He said the current freight rate recovery — rates have been rising for approximately five to six months — is being sustained in part because new capacity is not entering the market to chase the higher rates, a dynamic he attributed to the limited supply of qualified drivers.
Hazelwood also addressed diesel fuel economics, noting that crack spreads — the refiner’s margin on diesel — stand at $87 today versus a typical range of $15 to $20. He attributed the elevated spread largely to U. S.
diesel exports running at about 2 million barrels per day, most of it flowing to Northern Europe to replace supply disrupted by the Russia-Ukraine conflict. U. S.
crude production currently sits at about 14 million barrels per day and he projected it could reach 16 million barrels per day by next spring, which he expects will push crude prices into the low $60s or high $50s and bring diesel crack spreads below $40 within six months.
Hazelwood described a December meeting with Secretary Duffy, Administrator Barrs, and ATA President Chris Spear as a turning point in the industry’s relationship with federal regulators. “I have never been in a meeting with the DOT FMCSA to where when we left, we said, okay, these guys got it and they’re going to do som
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