Overdrive Radio

Bit of a public service announcement for the bulk of this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio. FMCSA Office of Registration director Ken Riddle emphasizes just what owners with motor carrier authority need to do by May 14 this week to prep for the agency’s long-awaited new registration system, called Motus. Maybe you'd also been wondering just what was so important about the May 14 deadline in the agency's most recent notification to the industry about it. On May 14, Riddle noted, at roughly 8 p.m. Eastern time, FMCSA’s current registration system will go dark. Motor carriers and other registered entities need to do three things by that time to ensure that getting set up to manage the company’s profile in Motus is, with any luck, a smooth one this coming week. **Log into your FMCSA Portal account to confirm it is active. If your account is disabled or archived, reach out to the FMCSA Contact Center to have the account unlocked. **In the Portal, ensure your company information, operation classification, contact information, and individuals authorized to access your record are all correct, with special emphasis on ensuring hte correct primary company official who will need to claim the account in the new Motus system. **Make any updates to your company information in the FMCSA Portal the same way you complete a Biennial Update. Select “Biennial Update (MCS-150)” in the “Registration” tab. Details from the most recent notice: https://overdriveonline.com/15823610 Next week Motus will launch likely Tuesday the 19th, and every entity that uses it for MCS-150 updates and all manner of other changes, as noted, will need to claim their Motus profile. Personal ID verfiication will be part of it, and though the old system will come back online, registration functionality will be gone. Find more details about the rollout in the podcast, likewise the extent to which this transition itself will function to weed out a lot of the junk of inactive, long-dormant entities from the system, and how it could hold big import for combating all the impersonation that’s gone on with hackers taking over legitimate carriers’ authorities as well as "chameleon" entities using multiple DOTs to evade enforcement. Folks all around trucking and among state enforcement officials join the the highest federal enforcement officer in the land, current FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs, in hopes that Motus will ultimately correct current registration limitations in detection of potential bad actors from the moment they apply for authority and the color of legitimacy it brings. Barrs called issues therein FMCSA’s “front door problem” as part of CBS 60 Minutes' reporting on Super Ego and the shape-shifting entities in its network. FMCSA registration director Ken Riddle speaks to some of the ways Motus will evolve to help combat that, and of course what carriers need to do before the transition kicks off Thursday this week. Good news is this should be a major cleanup effort itself, he said, and he wants legitimate carriers to take the steps to make sure it’s as smooth as possible. For those who don’t, there could be a lot of waiting for help on the other end of the transition. As mentioned in the podcast: **Roadcheck's kicking off May 12 -- resources: https;//overdriveonline.com/15824079 **Enter Overdrive's 2026 Small Fleet Championship: https://overdriveonline.com/2026sfc **FMCSA's registration office: https://fmcsa.dot.gov/registration and 800-532-8660. **Ongoing coverage of chameleon fleets with Alex Lockie's most recent report: https://overdriveonline.com/15824551

Just how likely is any given owner-operator to be inspected during the next installment of the Roadcheck inspection event? It's slated for May 12-14 next week, and if the 2025 event provides a roadmap, your chance is about 1 in 5. Just post-Roadcheck last year a few thousand of you weighed in with answer to the question shown in a chart you'll find at https://overdriveonline.com/15824079 21% of poll respondents reported being inspected during the three days of the 2025 event. A lot's been made in some recent years of how routine, really, those three days can feel in certain areas of the country, but the 21%-inspected number is well more than the roughly 15% of owner-operators who reported an inspection of some kind during the fully seven-day late-summer Brake Safety Week ithe prior year in 2024. So maybe it's true: Roadcheck really is more of an all-hands-on-deck sort of inspection event. In this week's Overdrive Radio, sit in on my CCJ colleague and editor Jason Cannon's talk with Travis Baskin, head of regulatory affairs for the Motive company, about the 2026 Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance Roadcheck, and ways owner-ops, drivers and small fleet owners might prepare for a focus on false logs. And not just as a result of the kinds of whole-cloth backend electronic logging device manipulation we're seeing new evidence of just today with a report from Overdrive's Alex Lockie about one driver's experience at a carrier CBS News linked to the Super Ego network of so-called "chameleon" fleets: https://overdriveonline.com/15823957 Regular readers will recall false logs was also the focus last year, CVSA’s annual campaign particularly keying in on misuse of personal conveyance, with results that showed hours of service as the single biggest out-of-service violation category. The year overall marked something of a sea change for the false-logs category as inspectors focused on PC misuse and were increasingly aware of ELD manipulation, too. 2026 false-log violation rates are on pace through March to hit the big totals seen in 2025 nationwide. This year, you can expect PC to remain in focus, and CVSA has created a new violation code for backend hours manipulation by a fleet or operator in concert with an ELD provider. So far, our sister data company RigDig’s accounting of violations hasn't caught up to the code coming into play in the data just yet -- it began to be issued April 1 this year with the annual OOS criteria update. Yet today we can show you some new rankings of states by their propensity to focus closely on and catch hours violations: https://overdriveonline.com/15824079 Indiana’s sitting at the very top of that list, issuing just more than 1 in every 4 violations in 2025 for hours infractions. Behind Indiana, all at higher than 20% hours violations, are Kansas, Oregon, South Dakota, Missouri, Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa and Colorado. On the logbook fraud front, too, it’s not just backend manipulation by a fleet or ELD company at issue, Travis Baskin notes. You’ve probably heard the “ghost driver” terminology, an electronic variant on the extra-logbook-under-seat approach to making it look right. Baskin, speaking to Cannon just ahead of CVSA’s annual workshop event early last month, said "this is the type of stuff I know that the CVSA is very well aware of," Baskin said. "I know there's going to be a focus on this type of behavior." Take a listen to the podcast for more, and find Roadcheck resources in the post that houses it at https://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio Primer on PC use: https://overdriveonline.com/15290807