I’m about to start a new part time job driving a couple of days a fortnight.Last time i used my tacho card was approx 18 months ago,can my new employer see what was stored on my card back then ? I have a clean record so not nervous for what he can find,purely curiosity.
What am i looking at paying for a shower nowadays in the truckstops or services ? My last job was European work so haven’t been in a truckstop in this country for the last 8 years…
Cheers
Generally your card will hold months and months of data. Mine goes back to March of this year but I did have a new card as mine was malfunctioning which is when I started using this card. So yes very possible to go back 12 months plus.
Welcome Break showers are free and are decent. Moto are also free but tend to be a bit crap. Truckstops vary from a pound to 3 pounds, price isn’t an indicator of quality. Most will be free with parking. Some you’ll swap keys for it. Tebay has possibly the best showers around.
A.
OK,well i guess they can see what i did in my last driving job then,not that it was a secret.
Free showers,wow,don’t even think i found any of those 10 years ago.
Thanks guys,much appreciated 
Neverstress:
I’m about to start a new part time job driving a couple of days a fortnight.Last time i used my tacho card was approx 18 months ago,can my new employer see what was stored on my card back then ? I have a clean record so not nervous for what he can find,purely curiosity.
Yes, the data stays on the memory chip until it gets overwritten, it gets overwritten when the memory is full which as has been said will generally be several months of card use, however as your card hasn’t been used for about 18 months it could hold data going back a couple of years.
Lymm Truckstops are OK allegedly, but what ever you do dont drop the soap … (dipper will be along shortly to confirm or deny … )
Officially, the cards have enough space like a computer hard drive to hold 28 days of driving data.
The thing is, a full 15 hours shift of say, driving around urban areas - will be what it takes to occupy one full day’s worth of space on the card.
Thus, you will probably find in practice that the data held goes back a lot further than mere 28 days. Days when you drove less than the maximum - occupy less space, and days you didn’t drive at all - take up zero space.
Because the data eventually overflows and overwrites the first data written on the card, if you’ve got a duty without much actual driving content, the data could go back years.
When I first joined an agency in 2011, my card was scrutinized to ascertain what my recent two years of experience was. There was data on vehicles I’d driven at Royal Mail from around 2007, thus already about four years old at that point.
That also means those of you who think “I’ll just work all these extra shifts I’ve been given - to cover up by over-writing that 7 hours without a break infringement that I got last week in case VOSA download me in the near future” - are making a futile gesture. 
Just to expand on the above…
The card can securely hold data for 28 days. The unit in the vehicle can securely hold data for 12 months. The key word there is securely.
In practice both the card and the VU can and will hold much more but the data is only guaranteed to be accurate for those timescales thus any events outside of those times can’t be used in cases of prosecution as evidence (although in that instance I’d say DVSA would ask your employer as they shoukd keep records for a couple of years of your downloads and the vehicle downloads).
Checking mine today, I can go back to 2nd June.
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Winseer:
The thing is, a full 15 hours shift of say, driving around urban areas - will be what it takes to occupy one full day’s worth of space on the card.Thus, you will probably find in practice that the data held goes back a lot further than mere 28 days. Days when you drove less than the maximum - occupy less space, and days you didn’t drive at all - take up zero space.
Because the data eventually overflows and overwrites the first data written on the card, if you’ve got a duty without much actual driving content, the data could go back years.
How long the data stays on the driver card has very little to do with how much driving you do, it’s the number of activity changes that decides how long the data will stay on your driver card.
I can’t remember the exact figures but each tachograph mode change will store x amount of bytes of data on the cards memory chip, when all the available kilobytes of memory are used the tachograph starts overwriting the data on the card.