The maintenance duty is not the driver’s, and saying so first makes the rest of the chapter make sense. § 396.3(a) requires every motor carrier and every intermodal equipment provider to systematically inspect, repair and maintain, or cause to be systematically inspected, repaired and maintained, all motor vehicles and intermodal equipment subject to its control. An intermodal equipment provider is a separate business from the carrier — it tenders equipment to carriers rather than operating it — and this part runs a parallel set of duties for it that the book does not otherwise cover. Parts and accessories shall be in safe and proper operating condition AT ALL TIMES, which is a standard with no scheduled moments in it: not before each trip, not at each service interval, but always. The section names frame and frame assemblies, suspension systems, axles and attaching parts, wheels and rims, and steering systems as examples of what is covered beyond the equipment specifications in Part 393 — a part that sits outside this book — and it adds one dated requirement, that pushout windows, emergency doors and emergency door marking lights in buses be inspected at least every 90 days.

That duty comes with records, and the records are the carrier’s. § 396.3(b) requires a carrier to maintain, for each vehicle it controls for 30 consecutive days, an identification of the vehicle including company number if marked, make, serial number and year — plus, where the vehicle is not owned by the carrier, the name of the person furnishing it; a means to indicate the nature and due date of the inspection and maintenance operations to be performed; a record of inspections, repairs and maintenance showing date and nature; and a record of the tests on bus pushout windows, emergency doors and marking lights. § 396.3(c) keeps those records where the vehicle is housed or maintained for 1 year, and for 6 months after the vehicle leaves the carrier’s control. A private motor carrier of passengers operating non-business is excepted from the record requirement.

Then comes the sentence that decides what any of this means to a driver. § 396.7(a): a motor vehicle shall not be OPERATED in such a condition as to likely cause an accident or a breakdown of the vehicle. The maintenance duty falls on the carrier; the operating prohibition falls where operating happens. So a vehicle the carrier failed to maintain is still a vehicle the driver may not operate, and “they were supposed to fix it” answers the wrong question. § 396.7(b) allows exactly one thing: a vehicle DISCOVERED to be in an unsafe condition while being operated on the highway may be continued in operation only to the nearest place where repairs can safely be effected — and only if doing so is less hazardous to the public than leaving the vehicle where it is. Note what the exemption does not cover. It is for a condition discovered en route, not one known before the wheels turned, and it buys distance to a repair rather than the rest of the trip.