Connecting Samsara or Motive to your TMS

Every truck you run is already reporting. The gateway under the dash knows where it is, how fast it's going, what the odometer reads, how much fuel is in the tank. You're paying Samsara or Motive somewhere north of twenty dollars a month per truck for that, and it works.

Then you open your TMS and type some of it in again.

That's the part nobody puts on an integration page. Not because the ELD is broken or the TMS is lazy, but because the two systems were built and sold separately, and the seams between them are narrower than the marketing suggests.

Key takeaways

• A standard ELD-to-TMS integration carries GPS and HOS one way, and doesn't treat odometer or fuel-tax mileage as synced fields at all. That's from Samsara's own developer docs.
• Odometer is the field that drives maintenance intervals, which is why its absence gets noticed at the worst possible moment.
• Truxo reads both Samsara and Motive through one internal interface, so you can run either, or both, and see one fleet.
• Trucks link themselves by VIN. Data refreshes every five minutes.
• This is vehicle telemetry, not HOS compliance. Your logs stay with your ELD provider, where the certified device lives.

What the two providers are actually for

Worth separating, because "ELD" gets used loosely.

Samsara and Motive both started from the compliance mandate: an electronic logging device that records hours of service so a driver isn't keeping paper. Both are FMCSA-registered for the United States, and both hold Transport Canada certification as well, which matters more than it sounds. Canada certifies through accredited third parties instead of letting vendors self-certify, so the list of devices accepted at a Canadian roadside is shorter than the US list. If you run cross-border out of Michigan, New York, Washington or anywhere along the northern tier, you want a device that clears both regimes, and these two do.

But neither company stayed there. Samsara sells AI dashcams, equipment and trailer monitoring, driver coaching, and a platform with a few hundred marketplace integrations. Motive covers similar safety and equipment ground and pushes further into spend management, with fuel cards and fraud detection sitting next to the telematics. Different bets, similar core.

The core is the part that matters here. Underneath the dashcams and the coaching, both devices are reading the vehicle bus and reporting position, odometer, fuel, and engine state on a regular cadence. That telemetry is the raw material your TMS wants.

The gap, from the vendor's own documentation

This is the specific part.

Samsara publishes what a TMS integration syncs. Not a blog post, the developer documentation. Two-way sync covers addresses, drivers, vehicles, trailers, routes and loads, messages, and forms. One-way, Samsara into the TMS, covers GPS and telematics, plus hours of service.

Read that list again and notice what isn't on it. Odometer isn't there. Neither is IFTA or fuel-tax mileage.

That's not a criticism of Samsara, who deserve credit for publishing the matrix at all. It's just the shape of the problem. The fields a dispatcher stares at, position and status, are the ones that flow. The fields your back office needs for service intervals and quarterly fuel tax are the ones you end up handling yourself.

You can watch this play out in public. A fleet administrator reviewing Motive in September 2025 wrote that because their IFTA report didn't separate New York toll miles from regular road miles, "drivers still have to manually keep a written record." A written record, in 2025, alongside a device that logs a position every minute. Another reviewer, an owner, reported that on some vehicles the odometer reading didn't come across correctly even though daily mileage did.

Neither person is complaining that their ELD is bad. Both are describing the same structural thing: the device captures more than the integration carries, so somebody fills the difference by hand.

Why odometer is the field that stings

Of everything that doesn't cleanly cross over, odometer is the one that costs real money, and it's worth understanding why.

Service intervals are mileage-based. Oil at whatever your interval is, brakes inspected on a schedule, DOT annual coming due. To know a truck is at 12,000 miles since its last service you need two numbers: the odometer when you serviced it, and the odometer now.

Without a telematics feed, "the odometer now" comes from somewhere softer. A driver reporting a number. A trip-mileage counter that adds up completed dispatches and quietly misses the deadhead nobody entered. Either way you get an estimate, and estimates drift in one direction: the truck has run further than your system thinks. That's how a service comes due three weeks late, which is how a roadside inspection finds something you'd have caught in the shop.

The absurd part is that the true number exists. It's sitting in your Samsara or Motive account right now. It just isn't reaching the system that schedules your maintenance.

How Truxo connects to both

Truxo treats Samsara and Motive as interchangeable sources behind one internal interface. Five operations, same shape for both: list the vehicles, get stats for one, get stats in bulk, get a location, get IFTA jurisdiction miles. Every screen downstream reads that interface, not the vendor.

Practically, that means nothing in Truxo cares which provider a given truck reports through. It also means running both is a normal setup, not an edge case, which matters more than it sounds. Fleets end up mixed. You standardized on one provider, then bought three trucks from an operator who ran the other, and now you have two portals. Truxo takes multiple accounts per provider too, each with its own label, so an inherited account stays distinguishable instead of getting merged into a pile.

Samsara connects with an API key. Generate a token in your Samsara dashboard, paste it into Settings, Integrations, under Fleet Telematics, and you're connected.

Motive gives you a choice. Authorize through Motive's own login screen, no key to copy or store anywhere, or paste an API key like you would for Samsara. The authorize route asks Motive for read access to vehicles, vehicle locations, and IFTA summaries, and nothing else.

Then the useful part: your trucks link themselves. On the next sync, Truxo takes every truck that has a VIN on file and no telematics link yet, matches it against the VINs in your provider account, and pairs them. No dropdown per truck, no spreadsheet of device IDs. Trucks with a missing or mismatched VIN stay unlinked and you pair those by hand from the truck's Telematics tab, usually a handful of trucks, not the whole fleet.

What comes across

The honest list, both providers, refreshed every five minutes:

Field	Samsara	Motive
Vehicle list (name, VIN, make, model)	Yes	Yes
Odometer	Yes	Yes
GPS position, speed, heading	Yes	Yes
Fuel level %	Yes	Yes
Engine state (on, idle, off)	Yes	Derived from movement
DEF level %	Yes	Not available

Two notes we would rather give you up front.

Samsara reports engine state as its own field. Motive doesn't expose it the same way, so Truxo derives it from the vehicle's reported movement: moving reads as on, stopped reads as idle, anything else reads as off. Close enough for a status badge on a map, and you should know it's inferred, not read off a sensor.

DEF level is Samsara only. Motive's API doesn't expose it, so the DEF gauge stays empty on Motive trucks. We'd rather say that here than have you find it on a Tuesday.

Where the data shows up

Connecting it is the easy half. What follows is what actually changes on the screens your team uses all day.

Maintenance intervals run on real odometer readings. This is the direct answer to the gap above. Truxo takes the odometer at the last service, subtracts it from the current telematics reading, and that's your miles since service. When telematics is unavailable, more than a day stale, or returns something impossible like a negative difference, it falls back to the trip-based counter instead of quietly reporting nonsense. So the number is as good as your data allows and degrades honestly when it can't be.

Live Loads shows the truck, not the phone. When a fresh telematics position exists, Truxo uses it in preference to the driver app's GPS. The device is bolted to the vehicle, it doesn't run out of battery, and it doesn't stay behind in the cab while the driver walks into the shipper's office. The map legend says which source a marker came from, and the position trail is stored, so where a truck went last Thursday is still answerable.

A fleet map that covers both providers. One map with every vehicle from every connected account, filterable by engine state, provider, account, and whether it's linked to a Truxo truck. That last filter is the practical one: it shows you at a glance which trucks are reporting and which are still unpaired.

Per-truck gauges. Odometer, fuel bar, DEF bar, engine badge, and a mini-map on each truck's Telematics tab, plus telematics columns in the trucks table so you don't have to open a truck to see whether it's moving.

ETAs from vehicle position. ETA calculation uses telematics position first and driver-app GPS as fallback, on the same freshness rule.

Four alerts, all opt-in and off until you turn them on. Low fuel, defaulting to 15%. Low DEF at 10%. Speeding at 75 mph. Sync failure if data goes quiet for 30 minutes, the one that tells you a connection broke, not that a truck did something. Thresholds are yours to set, delivery is email, in-app, or both, and there's a cooldown so one truck sitting under a threshold doesn't mail you every five minutes.

What Truxo does not read

This deserves its own section, because "ELD integration" invites an assumption that would be wrong.

Truxo does not read your hours of service. No HOS logs, no DVIR reports, no driver records, no engine hours, no accumulated idle time, no harsh-driving or safety events. None of it is fetched.

That's deliberate. HOS compliance belongs with the certified device and the provider whose audit trail an inspector will ask for. Duplicating logs into a second system creates a second version of a legal record, and two versions of a legal record is worse than one. Truxo reads vehicle telemetry and leaves compliance where it lives.

Two more, for completeness. Trailers aren't covered, only trucks, so trailer and reefer monitoring stays in your provider's portal. And quarterly IFTA in Truxo currently builds jurisdiction mileage from routed trip geometry, not from your telematics account. That covers the 48 US member states and the 10 Canadian provinces the agreement spans, and it knows the territories and Alaska sit outside it. But the telematics path for IFTA is written and not switched on, so we're not going to describe it as though you can use it today.

Getting started

Truxo is freemium, not a free trial: 40 loads, 4 users, 10 assets, AI included instead of sitting behind an upgrade. Plan details are on the pricing page.

If you're already running Samsara or Motive, connecting takes a few minutes and your trucks pair themselves. The fastest way to know whether it's worth it is to look at one truck's service schedule and ask where the current odometer reading came from. If the answer is a driver's estimate or a counter that only knows about dispatched trips, the number in your provider account is better, and it's already paid for.

Want to see it against your own fleet? Start free, or grab a demo if you'd rather have someone walk you through it.