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Beware digitalis!
Page 9
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Driver L Radley argues that is high time everyone stood back and thought again about using digital tachographs.
Last week 20 new Volvos arrived in our yard. You can't move without falling over the things. You can't park without having to back around them, You can't stand and talk to someone without leaning across them. We are overrun with shiny trucks which are speeded to a level that would have most drivers drooling and falling over each other to get their hands on one. Yet on Friday afternoon they were parked in every available nook and cranny because barely anyone wanted to drive one.
Why? Simple the dreaded digital tachograph (unless, of course, you are a well-documented sad case with an lveco addiction like me).
We're unusual here in that we are paid for what we do, as opposed to what we don't do. No hourly rate and hanging the bag out in lay-bys here; clocking up the miles is the name of the game. And there are now so many scare stories about how much time this fiendish piece of technology will rob from us, that no-one dares risk getting stuck with one. This great technological leap forward in drivers' and operators' working lives was intended to improve accuracy and make compliance with the law a piece of cake with its clever inbuilt timers. In fact it has fallen flat on its face. Vosa is now beginning to wonder what's going on and is running a side-by-side digitach test with an analogue unit. Meantime, the rest of us are left to cobble along and hope.
Even the most driver-friendly of companies can't be having perfectly good wagons sat around the place not earning, so its fair to assume that by the end of this week they will all have been allocated, by mild force if need be. If there is a problem with driving time it will no doubt be sorted to everyone's satisfaction in due course. But surely this is a situation which can't continue?
If even the enforcement agencies are questioning the digitach's accuracy, shouldn't we be having a moratorium on their fitment until it's been thrashed out once and for all? How many drivers' and operators' licences are going to be left wanting as a result of the current position? And what will the authorities do to compensate those wrongly penalised if their claims turn out to be true?
"If even the enforcement agencies are questioning the digitach's accuracy, shouldn't we be having a moratorium on their fitmentr