A digital tachograph is a legal instrument on a sealed card and it cannot be edited by a driver. Mine records forty one minutes of driving in the middle of a forty five minute break, in the same lay-by, and only there.
I drive nights on a fixed run and I have done for fourteen years.
Everybody thinks a tachograph is a thing a driver fills in. It has not been that since 2006. What it is now is a sealed unit in the dash connected to a sensor on the gearbox, and a smart card with a chip that goes in it, and between them they record every second of your day into one of four states: driving, other work, availability, or rest.
You cannot write to the card. The unit will not let you. The data is signed, and if the seal on the sensor is broken the unit knows and records that too, and a broken seal is the end of a career.
The reason all of that exists is the break rule. Four and a half hours of driving and you take forty five minutes, and if you do not, it is a fine for you and a bigger one for your employer and it goes on your record.
So a tachograph saying you drove through your break is about the most serious thing a piece of paper can say about a lorry driver.
I take my break in the same lay-by every night.
It is on the old road, which runs parallel to the dual carriageway for about nine miles, and I go that way because the lay-by is long, it is flat, there is a hedge between it and the road, and nobody else uses it. I have been stopping there since 2019. Half past one in the morning, forty five minutes, flask, sandwich, the radio off.
In the November of 2022 I got a letter from the office with an infringement report on it.
Forty one minutes of driving, starting at 01:48, in the middle of my rest period.
I went in the next day expecting to sort it out in ten minutes, because I knew exactly where I had been.
What I had not understood until the transport manager put the printout in front of me is how much else the tachograph records alongside it.
Distance. The unit takes its distance from the same gearbox sensor, and those forty one minutes have thirty one miles against them.
Speed. There is a speed trace. It shows an ordinary run: up to about fifty, a slow section, up again, a stop of about ninety seconds, and on.
And the unit logs the vehicle registration, which is mine, and the card, which is mine, and none of it is flagged as a fault or a power interruption, and the sensor seal is intact and was photographed intact at the next inspection.
Here is the part that took a year to establish, and the transport manager established it, not me, and he did it because he did not believe me and then he did.
The odometer.
The tachograph records distance, and the truck has its own odometer, and they are fed by the same sensor, so they agree. They have to.
The office also has the delivery paperwork, which has a mileage on it written by hand at the start and end of every shift by me, and it has the fuel bunker records, and it has a telematics box fitted by the insurer which is a completely separate system on its own GPS.
On the nights this happens, the tachograph records thirty one miles that the telematics does not have, the fuel does not account for, and the odometer does not contain.
The odometer is the one that finished it. The tacho's total for the night is thirty one miles more than the difference between the odometer at the start and at the end, and both are fed from the same wire.
He wrote that up and sent it to the manufacturer and the manufacturer came back and said the unit had been verified and no fault found, and they used the words data integrity confirmed, which I have looked at many times.
It has happened eleven times in four years.
Always in that lay-by. Always starting between 01:44 and 01:53. Always between thirty eight and forty three minutes. Always around thirty miles, which at those speeds is what that time is worth.
And the speed trace is always the same shape. I mean that literally: I have the eleven printouts and I have laid them on top of each other on a kitchen table, and the acceleration, the slow section, the ninety second stop and the run on are in the same places every time, to the minute.
Thirty miles of somebody's journey, recorded eleven times, by a machine bolted to a lorry that was parked.
What I have done about it.
Nothing works. The card has been replaced twice, the unit once, the sensor once, the truck once. It went with me to a different truck, and I am not going to leave that out, because it points at the card or at me and not at the vehicle, and I know it.
The office stopped counting them as infringements in 2023. He has a folder and the folder has my paperwork and the telematics and the odometer readings in it, and his position is that he has three independent records saying the lorry was stationary and one saying it was not, and that if it ever goes to a roadside check he will bring the folder.
I asked him what happens if it goes to a check and he said, honestly, that he did not know, and that he would get me a solicitor.
The last thing, and it is why I have written this instead of leaving it in the folder.
I stopped using the lay-by in the February. Not out of fear. The hedge got flailed and it is a cold spot now and there is a better one four miles on.
The eleven are all from when I used it.
There has not been a twelfth, and I thought that was the end of it, and then in the June I got a printout with my weekly because the office prints them as a matter of course.
There is a forty minute block on it. Not driving. The tachograph has a fourth state, availability, which is what you record when you are not driving and not working but cannot go off duty, and for forty minutes, starting at 01:51, at a time when I was on the dual carriageway doing fifty six miles an hour with my card in and the engine running, my tachograph recorded that I was available and that the lorry was stopped.
Thirty one miles of driving is missing from that night's total.
I have not shown him that one.