A planner's message on a Thursday afternoon
It is Thursday 15:20 and you are parked at a rest area on the E6 south of Dovrefjell, 210 km from the terminal in Trondheim. Your tachograph printout shows Monday 9h10 driving with an 11-hour daily rest, Tuesday 10h00 driving with a 9-hour reduced daily rest, Wednesday 9h50 driving with a 9-hour reduced daily rest, and a weekly driving total of 40h20. Today you started at 07:00, drove 2h05, took 45 minutes' break, drove another 4h00 and have since spent 1h30 loading and doing paperwork. The route uses a 50-minute ferry crossing where you can lie down in the cab with the engine off; after that there are 125 km of driving left and the planner estimates 2h05. The unloading slot closes at 18:30 and the loader turns away late arrivals. Your planner's message says: skip the break, take it on the ferry, and use a 10-hour day if you need one.
1. Is the planner's instruction lawful? Test both parts of it against today's figures.
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The 10-hour day: not available Daily driving may be extended to 10 hours at most twice between two weekly rests. Tuesday's 10h00 and Wednesday's 9h50 both used that extension, so Thursday is a 9-hour day. It would not help anyway: 6h05 driven plus about 2h05 remaining is roughly 8h10, well inside 9 hours. Driving time is not what is blocking you.
Skipping the break: not lawful either Since the 45-minute break ended you have driven 4h00, so you may drive 30 minutes more before a new break is due. The ferry quay is 45 km away, around 40 minutes at normal road speed. You would reach about 4h40 of driving before boarding, which breaches the 4.5-hour rule. Time spent queueing at a ferry is not a break, because you cannot dispose of it freely.
What is lawful The 50-minute crossing can count as a break, provided you genuinely rest and do no work such as supervising loading. So take 45 minutes now, or 15 minutes now and 30 before boarding, and use the crossing as the break for the next driving period.
2. What arrival time can you actually achieve, and what do you do about the 18:30 slot?
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Working it out
- Break 15:20 to 16:05.
- 40 minutes' driving to the quay: 16:45.
- Crossing 16:45 to 17:35, which covers the next break.
- 125 km, about 2h05: arrival 19:40.
Even the unlawful version, leaving at 15:20 with no break, only brings you to about 18:55. The slot cannot be met within the rules, and no amount of pressure changes that.
What to do Ring the planner now, before moving, and get the slot moved to Friday morning or an alternative receiving point agreed. The delay is a planning failure, not a driving failure, and it must not be paid for with someone else's driving time.
Check the wider limits 40h20 plus today's 8h10 is 48h30, inside the 56-hour weekly limit, but you must check last week's records for the 90-hour fortnight. Arriving at 19:40, a full daily rest means starting at 06:40 on Friday; a third reduced rest of 9 hours is still available this week and would allow 04:40.
3. At 15:30 you notice the mode switch was on 'other work' during the 45 minutes' break you took this morning. What do you do, and what must you be able to show at the next check?
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You cannot rewrite the card Recorded data stays recorded. What you can do is correct the record honestly and immediately.
The steps
- If the unit allows manual entries for the current day, enter the break for the correct period and sign the entry.
- Otherwise print the day's record, mark the correct activity on the printout in pen, write why the original is wrong, then sign and date it.
- Keep the printout in the vehicle and hand it in with the records at the end of the week.
What a check will want to see The current day plus the previous 28 days, the driver card, and any printouts or manual entries that explain gaps or corrections. A correction made at the time, signed and reasoned, is evidence of good practice. A correction invented later, or a mode left wrong for days on end, reads as an attempt to disguise the record and is treated far more seriously than the original slip.