Starting from the middle of June, all new trucks traveling within the EU have to be equipped with new smart tachographs. The lack of this equipment is subject to a financial penalty – more than 2000 euros for the company and 450 euros for the transport manager.
Smart tachographs are supposed to control the working time of drivers even better. This is because, among other things, they will record the start and end of the journey and the exact position of the vehicle every three hours.
With time (although the inspection services speak for a few or even several years’ perspective), it will also be possible to remotely preselect the vehicles to be inspected, thanks to smart tachographs.
Some prices to go up
For carriers, the new tachographs mean primarily new obligations and slightly higher costs. First of all, the new device will be more expensive than the previous one by several hundred zlotys. As the experts argue, it will still be only a fraction of all the costs that businesses incur when buying a new vehicle, so in the end, they should not notice a big difference.
However, it will be more expensive to calibrate the device, which will have to be carried out every two years at the most. The prices will even double to 110-140 euros.
Problems outside the EU
Carriers have to take into account not only price increases. They may also have problems when, for example, their truck breaks down outside the EU, where there is no obligation to have smart tachographs. And since there is no such obligation, the local workshops may not have (and certainly will not have) new workshop cards for the latest equipment.
For this reason, carriers may have a problem if they have to repair or calibrate their equipment outside the EU. However, the experts point out that in such a case, the journey can be completed within a maximum of 7 days after the detection of a defect.
What’s your gain?
Smart tachographs are not only problems and challenges, but also benefits.
“There is a new interface in tachograph for smart transport systems and optional equipment of tachographs in Bluetooth, so that the device will be able to share on an ongoing basis much more information than at present,” says Mateusz Włoch, an expert of the Inelo brand, the manufacturer of systems for accounting for the working time of drivers.
The latest smart tachographs of the first generation are now only mandatory for new trucks registered after 15 June. However, work is already underway to create rules to require these devices (the second generation announced) in all vehicles involved in international transport.
Source: TransINFO