The Freight Transport Association is delighted to announce the availability of significant new digital tachograph service products together with major enhancements to its range of analysis products. FTA’s new services provide unique automated analysis software in order to deal with the application of the new drivers’ hours regulations.

FTA has released the latest version of its CDU software to new and existing customers. This enhancement will allow full support of manual entries – effectively allowing the user to enter in mode changes and times for a full day if required. It also allows the user to choose whether a specific driver is an agency driver and if so allows the user to decide whether to analyse all, some or none of the data uploaded into the system.

The analysis software has also been enhanced to provide the most consistent interpretation of the latest drivers’ hours rules. Specifically the difficult issue of choice of application of weekly rest, when a period of rest spans two reporting weeks, has been considered carefully. The new automated analysis software provides an easy to understand approach to dealing with this issue which minimises the number of problem scenarios.

FTA is also making available new hardware products:

· A new lower cost Digital Driver Card Reader allows driver card data to be uploaded directly to FTA’s analysis software via a GPRS mobile network connection. The unit is simple to use, compact, and retails for £500 plus VAT.

· In addition, a new combined Driver Card and Vehicle Download Unit is now available which can not only take digital vehicle data direct from the digital tachograph, but can also directly download driver card data. Driver card and vehicle data can then be uploaded to FTA’s CDU desktop, the FTA toolkit software or a third party software for analysis using a USB connection.

· In the coming months FTA is planning to make available an inexpensive hand-held device (the Digifob) capable of reading driver card data and providing instant high level analysis.