Continental Welcomes Important New Roles for Intelligent Tachographs

The technology company Continental welcomes the adoption of Mobility Package I by the European Commission, the European Council and, on July 8, the European Parliament. Tachographs will have an important role to play here because the DTCO 4.1, Continental’s next-generation intelligent tachograph, will enable implementation of the guidelines set forth in Mobility Package I. Most important among these are the rules governing cabotage and posting of workers in the transport industry. In addition to their other functions, tachographs installed in commercial vehicles will record border crossings through a link to a satellite positioning system. “We welcome the use of the DTCO for monitoring compliance with the guidelines for cabotage and posting of workers, and we think it is good that tachographs will now be mandatory for vehicles with gross weights between 2.5 and 3.5 metric tons,” says Gilles Mabire, Head of the Commercial Vehicles & Services business unit at Continental. “The Mobility Package I will ensure fair competition in the European transport industry and promote better safety. That is very good news.”

Greater importance of tachographs

This decision is certain to increase the importance of intelligent tachographs because the Mobility Package requires them for achieving its transport policy goals. Trustworthy data from commercial vehicles will be needed for this purpose. “We’re making an important contribution to society, and we’re proud of it,” says Mabire. “We’re also very confident that our tachographs will help policymakers deal with a number of other important problems in society. Thanks to their ability to record clearly assigned data in a secure, trustworthy manner, they are a marvelous tool for this.”

Work on the next generation, the DTCO 4.1, has already begun at Continental’s renowned tachograph manufacturing center in the Black Forest. “We’ve been following the work on the Mobility Package very closely and have already drawn up technical scenarios for recording border crossings,” says Dirk Gandras, Continental’s manager in charge of tachograph development. The previous tachograph generations will provide the technological foundation, and the current version DTCO 4.0 can already receive satellite signals.

First industrial application of secure communication with European satellite system Galileo

The DTCO 4.1 will register border crossings by means of satellite positioning and record the locations where vehicles are loaded and unloaded. Authorities can use these data to check compliance with regulations, in particular those pertaining to market access and to posting of drivers. In fact, in addition to using GPS signals, it will be one of the first industrial applications to support Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) of signals from the Galileo system. The engineers of Dirk Gandras´ team have already taken the Galileo signal into account constructing the present DTCO 4.0 generation.