The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) notice of intent to proceed with rulemaking to mandate speed limiters on most heavy-duty trucks is being published in the Federal Register Wednesday, May 4. The publication of what the agency is calling an advance notice of supplemental proposed rulemaking opens the comment period for 30 days.
Comments can be made here through June 3.
As previously reported, the notice does not specify any speed to which trucks will be limited under the regulation and is not a proposal of any regulatory language to amend the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations. Instead, it is a fact-finding and data-mining tool for FMCSA to determine how to best proceed with the rule.
The speed limiter debate has been on the back-burner since early in the Trump administration. A joint rulemaking issued in 2016 by FMCSA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration explored potentially limiting trucks to either 60, 65 or 68 miles per hour.
[Related: FMCSA files notice of intent on speed limiter requirement]
The new notice is being published solely by FMCSA, and the requirements of the rule will fall to motor carriers to implement the speed limiters rather than the OEMs.
In the notice, FMCSA said it is considering making the rule only applicable to trucks manufactured after a certain date — potentially 2003 — "because this is the population of vehicles for which [electronic engine control units] were routinely installed and may potentially be used to govern the speed of the vehicles.”
