I've been to numerous transport events in the past few weeks and digital tachographs is a recurring theme which doesn't seem to be going away. The legislation was introduced back in April and to be honest I thought it had been taken on board by the industry and was going fairly smoothly - how wrong I was.

Take up of driver cards has been less than 30% of the driver pool and talking to the rental companies you get the distinct impression truck operators, big and small, really don't want to know. There's national fleets speccing their current rental needs as "non-Euro4, non-digital" and many have deferred their purchasing and operational decisions until well into next year.This would seem to be prudent practice, but the big rental firms are raising the alarm regarding spot hire, particularly in the event of breakdown of or damage to a truck, when without a driver or operator card operators won't be able to use the replacement truck.

Those that have gone digi are reporting many problems in operation with the downloading and management of the data, so you can't blame operators for taking a sceptical view of the new technology.