A 63-year-old Italian haulier was stopped on the morning of Thursday 30 July 2026 on the A13 motorway near Rothenbrunnen, in the Canton of Graubünden, while heading towards the Unterrealta heavy goods vehicle inspection centre. Officers from the Graubünden Cantonal Police first noticed that the vehicle’s lighting did not comply with regulations. Further checks, extended to the digital tachograph data, then revealed systematic breaches of driving and rest-time rules accumulated over the previous weeks. At the end of the inspection, the driver was ordered to pay a security deposit of 2,000 Swiss francs, about €2,150, a precautionary measure normally applied to foreign drivers stopped on Swiss territory pending any penalties.
The driver had avoided inserting his own card into the digital tachograph on numerous journeys, so that the infringements would leave no trace. According to the findings of the Graubünden Cantonal Police, this was the most serious element identified during the inspection. An almost identical case had occurred in Austria a few days earlier, where another Italian lorry driver had used his son’s card for the same purpose.
Analysis of the digital data made it possible to reconstruct the driver’s movements over the 57 days before the stop. Investigators found, in particular, one driving shift of almost 13 consecutive hours, along with failure to comply with mandatory breaks on more than 40 occasions, repeated breaches of weekly and fortnightly limits, and violations of the minimum daily rest period of nine hours. The inspection was carried out by officers from the Unterrealta heavy goods vehicle inspection centre, one of two facilities of this kind operating in Graubünden alongside the San Vittore centre. Both are run by the Graubünden Cantonal Police and are operationally managed by specialist staff.
