Comment by NomadicDaggy
1 day ago
> This isn’t advisory. It’s a physical limiter in the engine’s ECU. The truck cannot go faster.
I live in Latvia (in the EU) and see a significant part of our ARTICs on the roads go well past 90km/h daily. I presume their fleets do monitor the speed and alert the driver if speeding for a prolonged period of time but they are obviously not physically limited. Maybe the limits do come from the factory but get disabled? I really couldn't say.
A recent journalistic investigation uncovered a problem with the weight limit not being followed on a mass scale too. Specifically by our lumber industry whos drivers are incentivized to break the law. Even if you see a dangerous overloaded truck on the road and call the Police, it is likely no action will be taken because there only a couple of units in the country that are equipped to weigh a freight truck out in the field.
Probably the first thing to consider is the trucks have their speed calibrated periodically to ensure the accuracy of their tachographs (in the UK at least) so a truck doing 90kmph may show as 100kmph+ in a passenger car, I know my Volvo is 7% out, and my Seat is closer to 10% out.
That said, depending on the truck, there's fuses you can pull, ECU remaps and even for the older trucks with the magnetic sensor in the gearbox, the trick is/was to stick a magnet on the sensor (with a bit of string, so you can pull it off remotely if you get pulled over). All of these methods are becoming less feasible, as things like the aggregate wheel speed sensors used for ABS get used, you can't just fool one thing now.
As for the weight limit problem, that's a whole other rabbit hole!
Also I heard there's tricks like going to the calibration with underinflated tires to eek out marginal speed gains.
Cant they divert them to a nearby weigh bridge and find out?
Tachographs are mandatory and monitored across the EU so I very much doubt that's really happening.
Just because something is mandatory, doesn't mean it's enforced. You got 6 million trucks registered in the EU alone [1], plus fleets of trucks registered in adjacent states such as Turkey or Serbia, or old trucks out of the new Eastern European states that predate their EU membership and, with it, mandatory governors. And loggers can be manipulated as well, if you do it right there is no chance of finding that out without taking apart the truck.
Not every country is as thorough as Germany is in technical inspections, trucks from outside the EU don't need speed governors, and as long as you don't race your truck in Germany, France or Austria, chances are high no one will be bothered enough to pull your truck over for a detailed inspection on an examination wheel. Or you simply have two datalogger cards, that you swap out when going into one of these countries.
[1] https://trans.info/de/eu-lkws-alternde-flotten-449472
The enforcement and verification of tachographs grew significantly in last 20 years across whole EU, even in our eastern european countries.
So, again, I very much doubt that there's a mass scale, country-level, tachograph fraud happening in Baltic states without anyone else noticing.
And having been part of EU business that does trucking, police REGULARLY pull over trucks for tachograph inspections (including rest and speeding) even in southern and eastern europe. Any truck business owner would be rather insane to risk the fines tachograph fraud gives at any consistent rate.
Do companies and drivers try to break the law? Yeah, I believe that. Do trucks systemically, constantly drive above speed limit in Baltic states and noone is checking that? BS.
> Or you simply have two datalogger cards, that you swap out when going into one of these countries.
Which logs that the card has been swapped.