All About a Digital Tachograph

SINCE 1st May 2006, the installation of a digital tachograph is mandatory in all countries belonging to the European Union.

For all commercial vans which are newly registered and weigh more than 3.5 tons, there is the obligation to install a digital tachograph.

This allows recordings of drive and rest times to be more transparent and tamper-proof and also aims to improve work conditions for bus and truck drivers as well as enhancing road safety.

Digital tachographs have meanwhile become an indispensable instrument for fleet management which is widely used in the entire logistics sector. They prove that the respective driver dealt in accordance with the regulations of driving and service times as well as periods of interruption and rest.

Fulfill Your Obligations Correctly

If the use of a digital tachograph is – at least for some vehicles of your fleet – mandatory to gather all the necessary data about the road behavior of your drivers, another important step needs to be considered.

All data of the digital tachograph has to be readout and archived every three months, the data stored on the driver card every 28 days. In case of violations, there are fines up to 5,000 GBP; in case of missing data 2,500 GBP.

The purpose of the registration is to make the driving and rest data irrefutably legible, both for the vehicle owner and for an inspection body. Reading means that the data is copied or downloaded, and stored on a server or on a computer located at the site of the employer or client subject to a tachograph obligation.

Before we look at the benefits of having a tachograph fitted to a vehicle, you may be wondering what it is, so first let’s explain what a digital tachograph reading is. It is a digital device that by law you need both in personal and commercial vehicles that monitors all the activity about that vehicle, including

• Distance travelled
• Times when the vehicle is at a standstill
• Speed of the vehicle
• Monitoring of any faults
• Hours drove each day

Tachographs have always been an essential piece of kit for haulage companies to keep an eye on their driver’s habits and overall efficiency. Today we’re going to look at the benefits of these ingenious bits of technology.

Further Advantages 

Next to the strict observance of the regulations, digital tachographs can be extremely useful for fleet and logistics managers.

There are strict rules concerning driving times, breaks and rest periods must in any case be observed to avoid that fatigued drivers become involved in accidents roughly accounting for around 20% of all accidents.

In the long run, a digital tachograph offers advantages for the company concerning the route planning and an optimum vehicle occupancy.

The connection to a GPS-system and the wireless data transfer offers immense benefits for the fleet owner. Via the GPS-system, the fleet manager knows at any time where the company vehicles are, as he receives the current location of the respective vehicle in no time.

Moreover, the monitoring of driving times and rest periods may lead to a fair competition in Europe.

For all telematics systems, the digital tachograph takes effect as authenticated data source. Remotely fed with the authentication data, the system exchanges all relevant data between the company and the vehicle.

The mass data stored in the digital tachograph will then be retransferred remotely to the company, where they will then be archived.