After going over my time yesterday i thought i would post about this. Yesterday i done 4hrs 10 mins before a break. I then drove to my collection point where i swapped trailers and headed for the docks. Hitting the liverpool ring road i was on 4hrs 13mins. There must be 12 to 14 sets of lights on the way to the docks. 12 minutes later i was at the docks. That meant that the tacho should have read 4hrs 25mins. However, it showed that i had driven 4hrs 33 min. I would love to be taken to court as if you video’d the tacho and he time there is no way it could be construed in a court of law that you had driven over your time as the time on the tacho is in reality : completely wrong.
Now if id have had 45 mins break i wouldnt have got back to the yard within a 15 hour shift. The yard is 2 minutes away. I had no night out gear, nowhere near to get food but there was no way i was stopping there as i hadnt driven 4hrs 33mins. At most it was 4hrs 25mins. I went back to the yard and fuelled the unit and the 2/3 minutes driving i done after dropping the trailer turned into another 12 mins meaning i had 4hr 45mins showing. I havent driven that time. Digital tachos can simply not be admissable evidence in a court of law. Any decent solicitor would have a field day given half the chance.
This grievance i have comes on top of a collection i made in reed boardall last week. I had a 45min break on site before presenting myself. I loaded at 2 cold stores on their site and completed a 3rd shunt by parking up to wait for notes. As you have to close your doors each time you move this affects your tacho with it again adding up minutes rather than actual driving time in real time. I drove on their site for an absolute maximum of 3 mins yet leaving the site to head home the tacho was showing that i had driven for 17 minutes.
If i went to court and said a guy had punched me but there was video evidence showing id fell over then id get laughed at. So how can anybody be prosecuted on a device that isnt in any way accurate !
VOSA are fully aware of this and their own guidelines say to allow 15 minutes on a 4.5 hour movement before taking any interest in it at all. I had a chat with a couple of their inspectors when they did my operator site visit, I made all of the same points as you did about the inadmissibility of tacho evidence in court cases and they agreed.
It’s because they have a built in, well known fault with the software. Apparently it records work in two minute intervals and if you do less than two minutes it will record your activity as being what you were doing for the previous two!
So if you drive, stop, drive stop. Like you would in an RDC or going round several roundabouts, queuing etc, you will use far more driving time than you actually do.
Had this argument with a dcpc trainer for quite some time on a driving hours course, he had never experienced it and denied it was a problem!
Almost right, but not quite (well, in my experience with my own tacho anyway)
What it does is to record any minute in which you drive as a minute’s driving. So if you drive for four seconds, but two of those seconds are the last two seconds of 11:28 and two of those seconds are the first two seconds of 11:29 then that four seconds will be recorded as two minutes’ driving.
Harry Monk:
VOSA are fully aware of this and their own guidelines say to allow 15 minutes on a 4.5 hour movement before taking any interest in it at all. I had a chat with a couple of their inspectors when they did my operator site visit, I made all of the same points as you did about the inadmissibility of tacho evidence in court cases and they agreed.
That’s interesting as same as you I’ve never had problems with a few minutes here and there but heard a mmtm story the other day over a driver getting a fixed penalty for been five minutes over on a 4.30 drive.
I thought it was a bit of bs or not the whole story.
New ones are more accurate, but quite why the first generation digital tachos have this glaringly obvious problem, given that they must have cost millions to develop is a bit of a mystery.
Another anomaly is that if I pull up on 4:29 and put it onto break, then I will have been sitting there on break for 30 seconds or so when the dashboard will flash up “Driving time exceeded”, even though it wasn’t exceeded when I started the break.
kr79:
The new ones fitted in the last two years are much better they only round up to the nearest second.
Yeah they’re the opposite to the old ones it’ll read less time on the tacho than you’ve actually driven especially if you’ve been caught in traffic etc.
When we first got digi tacos we got told the following :
Never take a 15, always at least 18 mins
Make 30 mins 33 etc, and as for your daily rest either 9hrs 15 min or 11 hrs 15 min!
But as Harry says vosa are aware of the problem and takes this into account when looking at your hours.
I believe that when the EU wrote the legislation they took the view that if you drove for part of a minute, then that all counted as driving:so that’s how the original digitachos were configured.
The RHA ran a test with two trucks: one digi, one paper, and showed how much this was distorting time, so VOSA relented.
However, at least one operator (Intake Transport) got taken to court, prosecuted and fined for ‘hours’ offences that were nothing of the sort, but recorded as such on their digi tachographs (the drivers were using timers to record their actual driving time and breaks and driving within the law).
After the court case, Intake had to appear before the Traffic Commissioner, who implied that they should not have been prosecuted for these ‘offences’ at all and took a sympathetic view.
Since then, VOSA has been more realistic over digi tachos. But their introduction was a complete farce. The technology was forced on the EU by the French for commercial reasons before it had been properly trialled.
The current generation of digital tachos are far better than the first. The first are not really ‘fit for purpose’.
Harry Monk:
VOSA are fully aware of this and their own guidelines say to allow 15 minutes on a 4.5 hour movement before taking any interest in it at all. I had a chat with a couple of their inspectors when they did my operator site visit, I made all of the same points as you did about the inadmissibility of tacho evidence in court cases and they agreed.
Mk2 digi tachos are a lot better than the mk1 version…!!!
Thereal-john:
When we first got digi tacos we got told the following :
Never take a 15, always at least 18 mins
Make 30 mins 33 etc, and as for your daily rest either 9hrs 15 min or 11 hrs 15 min!
But as Harry says vosa are aware of the problem and takes this into account when looking at your hours.
I too was told this by VOSA. When I mentioned it here, Coffee (Lord rest him! ) Shot it down. So now I don’t bother. Just take the 45 and leg it.
Sorry for hijacking thread, but, I came across a problem with a tacho in a 60 plate MAN, I have always been good with my breaks and such, and never fell foul of this before. I got two infringements for driving for 6 hour 24 and 5 hour15 without a break, when I queried it, the transport shift manager said " all our 60 plates automatically default to POA when the ignition is switched off", so when I stopped for break, I changed the mode to break, as I can see it easier with the screen lit up at night, then switched off. I did not know that this happened hence the infringements is this legal or is it a company policy you think, when I asked, they could not be arsed to give a definitive reason.
sapper:
Sorry for hijacking thread, but, I came across a problem with a tacho in a 60 plate MAN, I have always been good with my breaks and such, and never fell foul of this before. I got two infringements for driving for 6 hour 24 and 5 hour15 without a break, when I queried it, the transport shift manager said " all our 60 plates automatically default to POA when the ignition is switched off", so when I stopped for break, I changed the mode to break, as I can see it easier with the screen lit up at night, then switched off. I did not know that this happened hence the infringements is this legal or is it a company policy you think, when I asked, they could not be arsed to give a definitive reason.
Sapper
I had a similar problem, I another TGA with the newer Tachograph (one minute type) head a couple of weeks ago.
It took a while to eject my card when I finished work which I thought was nothing strange.
When I reinserted my card the following day my Daily Rest Period had been counted as Other Work leaving me with a twenty five hour long infringement at the end of the week.
I reported the defect but my mate who regularly drives that truck tells me the Tachograph has been fine.
Thereal-john:
When we first got digi tacos we got told the following :
Never take a 15, always at least 18 mins
Make 30 mins 33 etc, and as for your daily rest either 9hrs 15 min or 11 hrs 15 min!
But as Harry says vosa are aware of the problem and takes this into account when looking at your hours.
I too was told this by VOSA. When I mentioned it here, Coffee (Lord rest him! ) Shot it down. So now I don’t bother. Just take the 45 and leg it.
Indeed. Once the display on the unit shows 15, 30 or 45 minutes or 9 or 11 hours then you are good to go, it won’t change back to 14 or 43 minutes or 8:58 or 10:59 when you start going You have had the amount of break/rest it shows on the display and it will be recorded on the data as such. The problem is if you pull up for a break, look at your watch or phone and it shows 11:30 then you crack off when it shows 12:15 the tacho won’t have recorded 45 minutes and you will not have taken sufficient break.
) Shot it down. So now I don’t bother. Just take the 45 and leg it.