A digital tachograph--a kind of "black box" to be installed in interurban
passenger buses, trucks, and tractor-trailers to monitor vehicle operations and driver
performance--has been created in a pilot project conducted under European Community and
French Ministry of Transport auspices with the cooperation of a major electronics supplier
(Thomson CSF).
The primary purpose of the tachograph is to monitor for traffic safety reasons the
number of hours the vehicle is driven, to ensure that drivers observe the rest periods
stipulated by EU regulations and do not exceed daily driving times.
Installation of the tachograph is required by national and international regulations in
Europe, and the version now in use records daily journey details on a paper disk. However,
there have been concerns that the current system is not tamper-proof and that some drivers
and the companies that employ them have not been abiding by the rules, which has led both
to safety risks and to unfair competition.
The electronic system to be selected this year by the EU Ministers of Transport will
work with individual "smart cards" carrying personal data for each driver, which
will be inserted in a dashboard slot at the start of each journey. Besides recording the
driving times, both the smart card of the driver and the main memory of the device will
continually register a range of operating data for each journey such as vehicle speed,
mileage, and fuel consumption, all of which will be available for company and public
authority use in case of accidents.
At the end of each trip or on a daily/weekly basis, the on-board information would be
downloaded, stored, and, if required, printed out by a central processing unit at company
headquarters. The prototype system operates in a Windows environment.
Return To International Focus
Some of these pages may include links to documents in the Adobe PDF format. Please download the Adobe PDF reader if you have not already done so.
