A DVIR is the driver’s record of a vehicle inspection. Enforcement rarely turns on the form itself — it turns on whether the defect somebody wrote down was ever repaired and certified.
A DVIR — driver vehicle inspection report — is the written record a commercial driver makes of a vehicle inspection, listing any defect that would affect safe operation. It exists so that a fault found at the end of one shift cannot quietly become the next driver’s problem, and it is one of the first documents an inspector or an auditor asks for.
Carriers rarely fail on the form. They fail on the loop that follows it: a defect is written down, the vehicle goes out the next morning, and there is no repair record and no certification that the fault was corrected or judged not to require correction. An unclosed defect on a signed report is worse evidence than no report, because it documents that the carrier knew.
A pre-trip inspection is the driver satisfying themselves the vehicle is safe before moving; a post-trip inspection produces the report. Which inspections must result in a written report, and for which vehicle types, is set by the regulator and has changed: in the United States, carriers of property were relieved of filing a report when no defect was found, while passenger-carrying vehicles kept the requirement, and other jurisdictions do it differently again. Check the rule that applies to your operation and your vehicle class rather than the one a template assumes — and note that the inspection duty never went away, only the paperwork for a clean result.
The document that gets carriers into trouble is the report with a defect and no matching repair record. Whatever your reporting obligation, close every reported defect with a dated repair certification, and keep the two together.
The failure mode is always the same: the pad lives in the cab, the report is filled in at the end of the week from memory, defects are written as "brakes ok" for eighty consecutive days in identical handwriting, and the one day something was genuinely wrong is indistinguishable from the rest. A report completed where and when the inspection happens, with the defect described in the driver’s own words and a photograph attached, is both more useful to the mechanic and more credible to an auditor. Ettex Forms collects the report on a phone at the vehicle, Ettex Board tracks each reported defect until a repair is recorded against it, and Ettex Records keeps the reports and repair certifications together for the retention period, feeding the same file as the vehicle maintenance program.
Being direct about what this is not: we are not a fleet compliance platform. There is no ELD, no telematics, no fault-code feed and no regulatory certification. Those products exist, they integrate with the vehicle, and for a regulated fleet of any size they are the right purchase. What a forms-and-records tool covers is the part that is still done by a person: the report, the defect and the proof it was closed.
Driver vehicle inspection report — the written record of a commercial vehicle inspection, listing any defects that would affect safe operation.
It depends on the jurisdiction and the vehicle class. In some regimes a written report is required only when a defect is found for property-carrying vehicles, while passenger-carrying vehicles report daily. The inspection itself is still required.
Retention periods are set by the regulator and are commonly measured in months rather than years for the reports, with repair records kept longer. Confirm the period that applies to you.
The carrier or its agent certifies that the defect was repaired or that repair was unnecessary, and the next driver signs to acknowledge having reviewed the previous report.
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