Highway, post-Montgomery, requiring ELD hookups for all carriers

Highway has grown sharply in recent years as its products aim to provide a high level of assurance to brokers that they are dealing with the carrier they had hired to move a load, and not another either non-existent trucking company or a fraudulent actor trying to steal freight. 

About nine of ten already hooked up

According to Brittany Graft, chief operating officer at Highway, about 90% of the carriers on the Highway system already have their ELD connected into the company. In the memo itself, Highway only says a “majority” of the carriers are connected.

She said the policy was first communicated to carriers on the system about a week after the Montgomery decision was handed down. 

“Your connections with brokers will fail if a valid and active ELD is not connected by the date listed above,” the memo says. It adds that brokers “may be more cautious to perform rule overrides” of a company’s status in Highway and proceed to book it for a load “given the recent ruling,” the memo said.

“What we saw coming out of Montgomery is that brokers are now held to an increased standard of liability, so one of the things they now really need to understand very simply is that the carrier they tendered the load to is the one picking up the load,” Graft said in an interview with FreightWaves.

Graft said information flowing from an ELD to Highway provides a significant amount of information, such as the identity of the carrier and its level of insurance.

The unanimous decision in Montgomery clarified conflicting circuit court decisions over the question of whether brokers could be found liable or negligent for a crash or other incident that involved a carrier it had hired. The decision from the nine justices was unambiguous: yes, they can. 

Some brokers were OK with not connecting

Asked why a carrier in the Highway system previously would not have chosen to connect its ELD to the company, Graft said brokers “have differing levels of requirements.” Some may not have mandated that a carrier they are onboarding needed to have its ELD connected.

“The broker always reserves the right to load whoever they want,” Graft said. A large carrier with a stellar reputation and other means of assuring a broker of its legitimacy may not need that ELD hookup, she said, “but the broker may keep that requirement in place for the ones they are more sure of.”

Graft said brokers still often push for visibility with carriers they know, and the ELD connection can establish that level of assurance. 

Given that the 90% figure for companies connected to the Highway system existed before Montgomery, and that Highway “gives brokers a good amount of visibility, what we’ve seen coming out of the decision is that they want to continue to drive that number higher and are pushing for that visibility,” Graft said.

But Montgomery could be changing the approach of those small number of brokers regarding ELD hookups or lack thereof. 

For example, Graft said, a broker that might have overridden an ELD hookup requirement previously might be less likely to do so if they contemplate a scenario where they are in court and need to defend an override. She raised the prospect of a broker being asked “tell me, why did you do that?”

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