The penalty proved costly for both the driver of an industrial vehicle and the transport company employing him. The local police of Terre e Fiumi, based in Ferrara, issued a €35,000 fine after discovering that the driver, stopped in the municipality of Tresignana, had exceeded the legal driving limit by a staggering 237 hours. This breach had not occurred in a single stretch but rather over multiple separate periods, making the violation more difficult to detect. When officers initially stopped the lorry and carried out a standard check of the tachograph, the recorded driving and rest times appeared to be in order. However, a detailed analysis of the driver card’s memory over the previous 56 days revealed that on several occasions, and in a systematic manner, the driver had failed to insert his card into the tachograph. As a result, over a two-month span, the driver accumulated 237 hours of unauthorised driving, covering a distance of 13,554 kilometres.
According to the officers’ reconstruction, the driver alternated between periods where he correctly used the tachograph card and others where he deliberately omitted it, thereby evading the recording of working shifts and rest periods. This pattern led the police to hold the transport company jointly responsible. The firm, based in the Campania region and specialising in the transport of fruit and vegetables, was specifically accused of failing to properly oversee its operations, as it had not regularly downloaded the tachograph data.
The local police calculated the total fine by adding individual penalties for each instance in which the tachograph data was not recorded. Under the Italian Highway Code, failure to insert the tachograph card incurs a fine ranging from €866 to €3,464, along with a driving licence suspension of between fifteen days and three months. The company was fined for failing to download the tachograph data, an offence punishable by a fine ranging from €335 to €1,336.
