At the beginning of 2021 we started to encounter a company card authentication issue where certain tachographs would stop authenticating once a company card had expired and was then replaced. The issue occurred when an expired company card was used during an attempt to authenticate the tachograph for remote download.

This quickly became a problem for many of our UK resellers and we are aware of at least 750 vehicles that have been impacted as a result. Upon investigation we found that the issue was isolated to VDO Smart tachographs which could no longer perform remote downloads, meaning the operator would have to revert to costly manual downloads to maintain their compliance.

As we investigated, we found this to be an issue with other remote download systems as well as our own and so we were able to work with our resellers, remote download customers and the tachograph manufacturer to troubleshoot and push for a solution. We had established that the expired company cards were triggering the problem within the tachograph itself, and therefore it was not a problem with our products.

We have helped our customers prevent further issues by making company card expiration dates easily available in digicentral and allowing users to set-up custom notifications prior to the expiration to ensure a new company card could be ordered. Despite the complexities of the card numbers and expiry dates being held in a section of the card that cannot be openly read, we also created a solution that automatically blocked attempts to authenticate against the expired company cards which in turn has stopped further tachographs and vehicles from being affected.

Having spent the last two years waiting for a solution, at the end of September 2023, VDO announced the availability of a firmware upgrade to address this issue. The upgrade can be installed onto all DTCO 4.0 devices - 4.0 (4042), 4.0e (4072), and 4.0ed (4073). This service information document details the steps a workshop needs to take to perform the upgrade.

We recommend that those tachographs that are known to have been affected with the remote authentication issue are upgraded to 4.0f (4075). VDO advise any affected customer to contact their workshop to discuss it. VDO will support the workshops to ensure this is resolved as smoothly as possible.