Plans to replace existing tachographs with smart-card technology are doomed
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because it will be unable to hold enough information needed by enforcement agencies, says an industry expert.
This latest warning follows previous fears that the new system will prove easier for cowboy hauliers to cheat (CM 29 April-5 May).
The European Commission wants all new vehicles to have digital tachographs from July 2001. But Dr Nigel Kirkwood, technical director of Tachograph Analysis Consultants (TAC), says the smartcard proposed by the EC can only hold eight kilobytes of information-the equivalent of around four A4 sheets of text. "On a normal tachograph you have the potential to store something like five megabytes." As one megabyte is the equivalent of 1,024 kilobytes, he says a massive amount of information currently available to enforcement agencies would be lost.
Instead, they would be forced to rely on "samples" of what the vehicle had been doing throughout the day and would no longer be able to match up speeds with the route a driver said he had taken. Accident evaluations would be hampered because any record of whether the driver was braking before hand would probably be lost too, he says.
"Another area of weakness is that the present design of digital units does not allow any manual entry of information. If you're stuck on the motorway for three hours due to an accident, you would not have the ability to add that information."
Dr Kirkwood, whose Liverpool-based company is one of the longest-established tachograph consultancies in the country, says the 2001 target date is unrealistic.
"From a technology point of view, I can't see it happening in July 2001. The concept is brilliant, it just does not work."
Last year a Carribridge University report commissioned by the Department of Transport warned that the smart-cards used to record a driver's hours could be vulnerable to electronic tampering, and that black-market cards could enable a crooked driver to replace an illegal history with a "clean" record.