New challenges for smart tachographs – problem with erroneous GNSS positions

A meeting of the Tachograph Expert Group, organized by the European Commission (EC) and the Directorate-General Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE), was held on 6 February 2025.

As a member of this group, our company was honored to participate in the discussion, represented by Małgorzata Pander, Mateusz Włoch and Piotr Żółty. 

Main topics of the meeting 

During the event, technical issues related to the new smart tachographs were discussed. One of the key topics turned out to be the problem of erroneous GNSS positions, which raises serious doubts both among device manufacturers and inspection authorities.

GNSS position refresh problem 

One example that sparked a particularly vivid discussion was the situation presented by ROADPOL’s Sven Kilian. He described the case of a truck that had its location marked as Romania for three days, even though it was stopped in Austria. The problem was caused by no GNSS position updates, which led to an erroneous entry in the tachograph. The driver, despite having the latest G2V2 tachograph, continued to record border crossings manually, making it possible to trace his route and determine the dates and times of each border crossing. It was only the removal of the driver’s card during an inspection that caused a reset and resulted in recording a crossing of the “Romania/Austria” border – a border that does not actually exist.

Possible error sources 

Analyses are currently underway to determine the source of the problem. Possible scenarios include:

• instances of random GNSS system freezes;

• GNSS module software errors;

• other, as yet unknown factors affecting the operation of tachographs.

Our activities 

As a company with extensive experience in telematics systems, we are actively looking into the topic and will immediately send our recommendations to the EC and DG MOVE. The goal is to develop effective solutions that will increase the reliability of smart tachographs and improve the quality of data recorded by the GNSS system.  We will keep monitoring the situation and report on further findings