Hi All,
I have a question about the tacho where I feel I should know the answer but I simply don’t. It had never affected me before until the other day.
My job involves driving and installation work. I never really get anywhere near using all my driving hours. It’s usually just WTD that I have to worry about.
Anyway, on Friday I was at a customer site doing some installation work. It took me almost 2 hours to drive the lorry there so almost 2 hours driving on the tacho. It was, obviously, then on other work while doing the install work.
About 2 hours later I had a break with a meal in their own on-site canteen.
I quickly returned to the lorry and placed it on break intending for about 30 minutes. When I returned after the break, 48 minutes had actually elapsed so now my driving time had gone back to zero.
So my question is if I needed to drive and then reached the 4.5 hours, if I had another 45 minute break, could I then still use some or all of the 2.5 hours I lost from the first 4.5 hours when the tacho went back to zero? Obviously taking WTD in to account and not driving more than 9 hours in the day and not driving more than 4.5 hours without a 45 minute break.
If you had a 10hour drive spare then you would be able to drive another 3 1/2 hours on the last section as
4.5 + 2= 6.5 as long as you don’t go over 15 hours total duty if you’ve got one left or 13
Steevo25:
So my question is if I needed to drive and then reached the 4.5 hours, if I had another 45 minute break, could I then still use some or all of the 2.5 hours I lost from the first 4.5 hours when the tacho went back to zero?
You never lose driving time
In your case you can do 2 then 45 break then 4.5 then 45 break then 2.5 on a 9 hour drive day or 3.5 on a 10 hour drive day
The daft thing is that the more driving time breaks you have the longer the work shift becomes
Thank you for the replies. That clears that up. It’s kind of what I thought. The only reason I asked is that the tacho only seems to show the latest 4.5 hour block so I guess you have to keep track manually if you don’t do 4.5hrs, 45mins break, 4.5hrs.
At least I cannot see total daily driving time on our tacho screen without doing a print out.
Steevo25:
Thank you for the replies. That clears that up. It’s kind of what I thought. The only reason I asked is that the tacho only seems to show the latest 4.5 hour block so I guess you have to keep track manually if you don’t do 4.5hrs, 45mins break, 4.5hrs.
At least I cannot see total daily driving time on our tacho screen without doing a print out.
What vehicle and tacho make? Maybe someone can help you out with the display?
The Stoneridge I normaly use has a countdown of available driving time. It will countdown from 4-30 in full driving session, but if you`ve used two 4-00hr drives, for instance, it will only countdown from 1-00hr or 2-00hr for the last session.
It will be less if you are approaching the end of your working day, no matter how little drivetime used.
It’s Siemens in all the trucks.
To be fair, I never even approach maximum driving time. It was purely as a learning curve that I wanted to know for the future. Most of our time is usually installation work. The lorries are only really used to transport the equipment to site and then get home again. WTD is the important one for me.
It’s very rare to do any type of multidrop and there are usually 2 drivers in the cab. I have never got to the end of a second driving session after a 45 minute break so no idea how the tacho behaves after that. All I can see is that once I have taken 45 minutes of break, the tacho zeroes and I cannot see anything that shows my total driving time for the day. Maybe once I get to the end of a 2nd 4.5hr session, it may countdown what I have remaining. Just never got there to find out.
I did do a days training in drivers hours for my CPC, but looking back, it was kind of poor. There was no physical use of a tacho, just shown via slides. Plus all the examples given were using maximum hours. I didn’t know enough about it at the time to even think of asking these questions.
The tacho is replicated in the dashboard of a lot of modern trucks now (might need to scroll to find it) my dashboard has more info than on the face of the tacho including total drive time for 1, 7 and 14 days.
Steevo25:
It’s Siemens in all the trucks.
This is a link to VDO (Siemens) Release 2 digital tachograph manual but the daily driving time display will be the same in later models.
Scroll down to page 53 fleet.vdo.com/media/1375/gb … 100102.pdf
