A truck driver who hasn’t slept in 22 hours has roughly the same reaction time as someone at a 0.08 blood alcohol level, which is legally drunk under Texas Penal Code Section 49.01. But unlike alcohol, fatigue doesn’t show up in a breathalyzer. There is no roadside test for fatigued driving, no number on a report, no obvious evidence left at the scene. For a long time, that made it easy for trucking companies and their insurers to deny it ever happened.
That has changed. And if you’ve been injured in a crash involving a commercial truck in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, it may change your case entirely.
Since 2017, federal law has required most commercial truck drivers to use Electronic Logging Devices — ELDs — that automatically record their driving time, rest periods, engine activity, and GPS location. These aren’t paper logs that a driver can fill in over breakfast. The data is generated by the truck itself. And when our Carrollton and Dallas truck accident attorneys get access to it, it tells a story the trucking company can’t easily rewrite.
What ELD Data Actually Shows
An ELD syncs directly with the truck’s engine and records everything in real time: when the engine started and stopped, how long the driver was actively behind the wheel, when they were on duty but not driving (loading, fueling, inspections), and when they were supposed to be resting. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Act (FMCSA) Hours of Service rules set hard limits on all of it — no more than 11 hours of driving after 10 consecutive hours off, no more than 14 total on-duty hours in a single window, a mandatory 30-minute break after 8 hours of driving and no more than 60 hours on duty in 7 consecutive days or 70 hours on duty in 8 consecutive days driving.
When a driver violates those rules, the ELD records it. We get those records, and we build the case from there.
How We Use It to Prove Fatigue
The most direct use is straightforward: we pull the logs and compare them against the federal limits. If a driver was in hour 13 of a 14-hour window when the crash happened, that’s not a theory. It’s documented in the data tied to the truck’s engine.
But we don’t stop on the day of the crash. Fatigue builds over days, not just hours. A driver who’s been sleeping five hours a night for a week leading up to a crash is dangerously impaired even if their hours technically look compliant on the day of the collision. ELD records let us look back across the full week — sometimes longer — to show that pattern.
The catastrophic consequences of this buildup are tragically common on our roads. We saw this firsthand when a devastating Kaufman County truck wreck near Terrell in 2025 claimed multiple lives after a semi-truck driver allegedly fell asleep at the wheel and plowed into stopped traffic at highway speeds. When commercial drivers push past their physical limits, passenger vehicles bear the brunt of the impact.
Because the stakes are this high, drivers and carriers often try to hide the paper trail of their exhaustion. To catch these cover-ups, we cross-reference the GPS location data embedded in the logs. If a driver logged “off-duty” time at a rest stop but the GPS shows the truck was moving, that’s usually a falsified record. If the logged rest stop is in one city and the truck was actually somewhere else entirely, that’s evidence worth digging into. Discrepancies between what the logs say and where the truck actually was can expose false reporting, which is a serious federal violation and significantly strengthens a negligence claim.
Some carriers go further and pressure drivers to manipulate their logs outright — splitting driving time between co-driver accounts, editing status entries after the fact, or logging rest that never happened. ELD systems keep an edit history. We look at it. When we find tampering, it doesn’t just help the driver’s case; it points directly to the carrier’s knowing, willful disregard for safety.
Why You Can’t Wait on This
ELD records aren’t kept indefinitely. Federal regulations require carriers to retain them for only six months. After that, the data can be gone: overwritten, archived offsite, or simply deleted. The trucking company’s legal team knows that timeline. Ours does too.
The moment O’Hare and Koch takes a truck accident case, we send preservation letters demanding that all electronic records — ELD data, GPS logs, dispatch communications, driver qualification files, and more — be secured and not destroyed. That step alone has made the difference in cases where critical evidence would otherwise have disappeared before litigation ever began.
Beyond the ELD, we also request the driver’s prior Hours of Service violation history and the carrier’s safety ratings from the FMCSA Company Safety Profile system. Fatigue is rarely a one-time lapse. More often it’s a symptom of a carrier that builds schedules that are difficult for drivers to meet legally, then looking the other way when logs don’t add up.
The Carrier Bears Responsibility Too
Under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, trucking companies are required to monitor their drivers’ hours and ensure compliance, not just hand out logbooks and hope for the best. When a carrier builds delivery schedules that make Hours of Service violations inevitable, ignores red flags in their own data, or pressures drivers to stay on the road past legal limits, they share liability for what happens next.
As Carrollton and Dallas truck accident attorneys, we pursue claims against both the driver and the carrier. That’s where full accountability lives and it’s how victims get full compensation.
Talk to O’Hare and Koch Before That Data Disappears
If you were injured in a commercial truck crash anywhere in the Dallas–Fort Worth or North Texas area, the evidence you need may already exist but the window to preserve it is short.
At O’Hare and Koch, our Texas truck wreck lawyers move quickly to secure ELD records, reconstruct what happened, and build the strongest possible case on your behalf. There’s no fee unless we win.
Contact O’Hare and Koch today for a free case evaluation.
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