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Those Solera devices you've got are relatively common automotive IoT fleet trackers. They usually have gps antennas. They talk to the engine and transmission directly over canbus. Then they process that data and report what they see over a cell network. If they see nothing, they report that too with a heartbeat signal and various error codes.
Depending on the model, they sometimes have external cell antennas connected with a mini coaxial cable. Find it and unscrew it all the way, then re-screw it in by only 1 and a half rotations so it'll hang on but barely. Then clip the nearest ziptie so the cable wobbles free. It'll cause the nut on the coax to get a stress fracture in under a year. They will have to replace the gps/cell antenna module and those are like $300 a piece through Samsora. In the meantime you'll get iffy signal responses. Don't let them catch you cutting the zip tie on camera or you WILL lose your job.
Your truck will be in the maintenance shop relatively frequently at the request of whoever reads the reports for repair of that cell module. They won't find anything wrong with it, scratch their butts, then just screw it back down and replace the ziptie.
Unscrew it and clip it again.
Hey director of IT for a trucking company here, i just want to reiterate this part!
Don't fucking do this. Any of this advice. You WILL lose your job and we WILL blacklist you from the industry for this shit. Maybe if you drivers could actually mange your fucking log books and follow the safety regulations we wouldn't need to have ELDs and camera and GPS and fucking canbus monitoring and annual inspections and all of the other """invasive nonsense""" the government requires.
I dont want it either. Its all crazy expensive, annoying to manage, and I have to constantly deal with drivers complaining about it.
Sorry. I'm a little upset with this issue because its a constant issue i have at work. But no there is nothing you can do besides just get another job.
I just want to reiterate it again. Do NOT mess with the equipment your company has in your truck. At best you'll just get fired but I've seen my company respond with legal measures in the past.
Those companies would deploy this shit anyways even if the logs were perfect. Anything to blame the employee can and will be deployed.
I want to say that businesses are famous for spending enormous amounts of money to fix a solved problem sarcastically but I've been working too long to believe it.
Still, so much of the problem isn't with the monitoring but the annoying middle-management response of stack-ranking all the drivers. Rather than just playing your hand, big employers are constantly trying to reshuffle and "optimize" staff in order to squeeze out an extra ounce of profit. And the end result is everyone being immiserated in order to give someone with a marginal fluctuation in performance a raise.
Shit rolls downhill.
Same old shit. Companies treat employees like machines and numbers on a spreadsheet and demanding more and more productivity while paying lip service to rules and regs yet knowing that employees will skirt, bend, or break the rules to meet whatever sterile metric the beancounters set within the expected window.
Don’t meet the metric? Get some bad performance reviews. Start referencing the safety rules that slow you down? Not a team player. Get fired for some nebulous problem.
Most of the time it’s ignored, but when something goes wrong the company just blames the employee for failing to follow regs.
Automated system reporting just keeps the costs down by creating a higher turnover of employees.
Look I can tell you that no company wants to spend enormous amounts of money (we spend close to 7-figures per quarter for asset tracking) and pay an entire team of people to micromanage drivers. Plus companies and drivers make less money because they have to actually follow the rules now.
ELDs have been around for a really long time. It didn't become standard until 2017.
Trucking is so funny. There is an adversarial relationship between the drivers and the office, which you can see in this comment.
The industry is trying to solve safety issues caused by the nature of long haul driving and maintenance of profit in logistics by companies that use their services.
Trucking used to be a way a person could provide for their family, remain independent, and feel in control. Now, trucking is an industry where you are trapped in a moving computer designed primarily to reduce the insurance rates of the company that employs them, because their business practices and demands were so dangerous, individuals truckers had to drive more hours, get paid less for those hours, and literally drive themselves, and other motorists around them when they crashed, to death.
Then they blame the truckers as they race to bottom in hiring. Don't even get me started on nafta. Your industry sucks for the employees who are necessary to keep the economy moving.
Still can. There are still owner-operators, and they have significant control over how they do their job, as long as they aren't caught cooking their books (...which is what most drivers used to do before there were crackdowns, because you got paid per mile). They usually get paid a lot more than fleet drivers, because fleet drivers aren't responsible for the maintenance of the truck.
The safe way to fight back is through the trucking unions, which don't seem interested in getting rid of this invasive software.
But if every trucker did this they couldn't blacklist them all.
Unions aren't interested in pushing back against the invasive software because they know drivers haven't been following the rules.
Basically nobody in the industry wants this. It makes it harder to do our jobs, it's more annoying, and it's crazy expensive. But it's what you gotta do when drivers run 2 or 3 log books.
Yeah, this is a problem of pushing compliance to a level above the operator in an area where the perfection demanded by policy relies on traffic behaving perfectly, and drivers never experiencing delays or problems, to operate. The only way this goes away is a scarcity of drivers.
Someone who believes they know how to drive will suggest automated trucks, but the accident lawsuits will probably bankrupt the first companies.
It would work if you made lanes for self driving trucks.
You could then tie a bunch of trucks together, and have them run on this special lane.
This is brilliant! You can even let the front truck pull all the others tied behind it so you need fewer working engines.
What if you added guide rails to the lane so the trucks didn’t have to steer?
I dunno, companies would start cutting costs by firing all but the front driver. Need strong unions in place before that.
And we could manage traffic stops when one is going to cross another street so it can save on fuel for not having to stop!
Woah buddy, you're just talking crazy now.
maybe find a new job where you don't act like completely garbage manager? or work to find a human centric solution rather than... oppressive digital technologies?
I hope you end up with a neurolink in your skull and are constantly monitored for wrongthink.
My dude. How would you like a camera over your shoulder every minute of your workday, recording your every move? What might you do faced with that?
shown it my nuts
Name checks out
I work in an office with cameras ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"I'm oppressed so I must also oppress those I have power over"
you are part of the reason everyone hates management. the overburden of society by technofascists like you will result in many horrible repercussions down the line.
giving nerds any power over workers was a mistake
Hey so it's actually the federal department of transportation that decides we need super invasive tracking! And they decided that after a ton of accidents directly caused by drivers not paying attention and working crazy hours.
I also don't want to pay or manage this crap but here we are.
Counterpoint: I would love to not be run over by a truck driver that decided that when redbull stops working a swig of whiskey will help him be awake after skipping the night sleep. You know how I know that I would love to not be in this situation? Because this exact situation happened to me and it sucks, even though I survived.
If anal probes is something that prevents heavy equipment operators from breaking the rules, so be it. I would prefer them not need that also.
Reading this thread is really selling that dream job.
You all keep doing what you're doing and there will be no drivers left to squeeze out and make their life even more miserable.
The IT lackey just trying to make ends meet has no say in this process.
ah, the just following orders guy
this is a similar argument to the nazis. this is how bureaucracy and management normalize oppressive conditions. a bunch of weak yes-men
Reductio ad Hitlerum is a really weird thing to pull out of your ass on this particular discussion.
You're the fucking problem. Maybe if you treated people with humanity and worked towards a common solution instead of using technology to drain people's souls, you wouldn't have people that hate the shit you're slinging.
What you do makes the world a worse place to live in.
He didn’t say he was management and bought the stuff. He said he worked in IT. So with any power to make decision across a fleet.
I appreciate you defending me, but I did say I was director of IT so unfortunately I am management. But it wasn't me deciding to install this stuff on our fleet, it was the federal government.
Well the whole bit about backing out the nut is to cause it to fail in a manner that looks more like a maintenance problem and not a driver problem. Even when stuff like that only happens on one cab, it's not enough to point at a singular driver.
And yeah all of that advice comes with the rider that "you may be unemployable" afterwards.
Yeah I get that. But you aren't clever and you aren't the first one to think about that.
We will catch you
Eh, that's never true. Some people will be caught. And the typical person who gets their CDL only works a few years before they realize the industry sucks for drivers and burnout.
Lol I don't care about OP getting caught. This isnt the r/goodlifeadvice
So, what I'm hearing is "don't struggle or it's gonna hurt more". I think this advice is horrible.
No. It's two things.
Maybe truck drivers should have followed the rules better and drove safer. Drivers cooking their books have caused enormous amounts of harm and death, and that's ignoring the huge loss of money when a driver crashes because they've been driving for 26hrs straight.
Don't fucking damage company property. This is actually my biggest sticking point for this whole thing. I dont care if you like it or not, the hardware is not fucking yours and the hardware being there is part of your employment agreement. Don't like it? Tough shit buddy take it up with the DOT.
Who tf references a truck driver blacklist?
This is gonna blow your mind... But other transportation companies...
Truck driving companies.....??
HR, always.
This is literally 90% of what they're paid to do.
You know there's plenty of control freaks micromanaging everything underneath them even if it pisses off their best people to the point of quitting.
Especially those 1 or 2 rungs higher up the chain who need to make up problems to solve so they can justify their existence.
Man i have had drivers i work go full on road rage. No really he reached up and tried to tuen off the camera. Im not sure if had a fake button or he jist pressed the wrong on. Bit he the grabbed a gun and got out. This was after pushing a car in the cement baracade.
Its crqzy what some people do in cars