Every spring, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance runs International Roadcheck. For 72 hours, inspectors at roughly 1,500 sites across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico pull trucks over for Level I inspections, which cover both driver credentials and vehicle mechanical condition. In 2025, CVSA reported roughly 17,000 trucks placed out of service during the event. That is one in five trucks inspected, off the road, costing their fleets revenue that same afternoon.
If you run a fleet or drive for one, this is not a theoretical risk. It is a bill, and it is already in the mail. The good news: the violations that knock trucks out of service are not random. Year after year the same five categories account for the bulk of citations. If you close the gaps on those five, your odds of rolling away clean go up dramatically.
Brake violations have led the CVSA out-of-service list for as long as the data has been kept. Roughly 25 to 30 percent of vehicle OOS orders trace back to brakes: out of adjustment slack adjusters, worn linings, leaking air chambers, inoperative ABS malfunction lamps.
Fix this week: run a full brake inspection on every truck in the yard before May. Pay particular attention to slack adjuster stroke, air leak rate at full application, and the ABS indicator lamp cycle at key-on. Document it. If you use DocuDrive to track maintenance events, tag these inspections with a “Roadcheck prep” label so you can pull a clean report if a shipper or a broker asks.
Tires are the second most common vehicle OOS category. Inspectors flag tread depth below 4/32 on steer axles and 2/32 on drive and trailer axles, sidewall damage, and under-inflation beyond 50 percent of the tire’s max rating.
Drivers lose points here for one reason: they do not put hands on every tire during the pre-trip. A quick walk-around at the yard is not enough. A thumping sound test catches flats in duals. A tread depth gauge catches slow wear that the eye misses. Cost of a gauge: about $12. Cost of a tread depth violation: up to $1,500 plus the load.
Required lamps that do not work are a frequent citation. A single burned marker lamp will not usually trigger an out-of-service order, but patterns do. If multiple lamps are out, or if a required reflector is missing or obscured, that moves the ticket up the severity ladder fast.
This is the easiest category to close. Before the blitz, walk every unit at night or in a dim bay. Key on, flashers on, brakes on, turn signals cycling. If you cannot see it, fix it.
On the driver side, HOS violations are the number one out-of-service category. Form and manner errors on ELDs, missing certifications, falsified logs, and trucks driven past the 14-hour clock all pull drivers off the road, often for 10 hours on the spot.
Most ELD citations are avoidable. They come from drivers who never certified yesterday’s logs, drivers who forgot to switch from personal conveyance to on-duty, and dispatchers who pushed a driver past the 11-hour clock because they misread the remaining time. A weekly HOS audit, done by the safety manager on Friday for the week just finished, catches 90 percent of this before an inspector does.
Expired CDL, expired medical certificate, missing endorsement for the cargo being hauled. These are paperwork problems, but they still park the truck. A driver with an expired medical card is out of service for 10 hours, full stop. The driver cannot even move the truck to the shoulder legally.
Build a 60-day expiration alert for every CDL, every medical card, and every hazmat endorsement in the fleet. If you are tracking this in a spreadsheet today, stop. One missed row costs more than a year of a compliance tool.
Three moves before Roadcheck arrives:
Fleets that prepare for Roadcheck end up safer all year. The checklist is not a gimmick; it is the baseline the entire industry is measured against. Treating May as your annual stress test and leaning into it, instead of dreading it, turns the event into the cheapest safety audit you will ever run.
DocuDrive keeps your documentation, maintenance logs, driver credentials, and ELD records in one place so that when an inspector holds out a hand, you have something clean to give them. See how we help fleets pass the blitz at docudriveapp.com.
No credit card, no spam – just an honest assessment.
