MyGeotab currently provides gear position for a new trip using the last known value from the previous trip, until the device reports the actual gear signal. If the previous trip ended in reverse, that stale value can trigger a brief false "Backing Up When Leaving" or "High Speed on Reverse Gear" event even though the vehicle is actually in Drive or Park, affecting a meaningful portion of fleets using gear-position-based exception rules. Going forward, the system will report gear position 128 ("Unknown") during the ambiguous Ignition Off and Ignition On windows instead of continuing to report the possibly-stale gear value, the same pattern already used for Seatbelt status.

This reduces false reverse-gear alerts at trip start and end, cutting unnecessary notifications for affected fleets.

Because MyGeotab's "Backing up when leaving" stock rule only fires when the gear diagnostic is less than 0, and 128 is not less than 0, the rule stops firing on stale data automatically. While genuine reverse activity may briefly not trigger an alert during the "Unknown" window, real backing-up events are still detected as soon as the signal updates.