Staying under three and a half tonnes: what equipment tare does to the driver's day

Weighing the van twice is a good habit: once empty, once in the state it actually leaves the yard in. The gap tends to be wider than the office estimate, because the empty container, the eutectic plates charged overnight, the dolly underneath them and the empty pallets all sit on the scale as separate lines beside the goods. Add those lines up and the loadable quantity shrinks, the fleet starts looking at the next vehicle class, and that is where the needle crosses three and a half tonnes.

It pays to be exact about where the line is drawn. Section (A) of Article 98 of the Traffic Regulation covers drivers of vehicles that carry goods commercially and whose maximum weight exceeds 3.5 tonnes. Since the figure taken as the measure is the maximum weight printed on the registration document, a half-empty day falls under the same regime. Once equipment tare has moved you into the higher class, the consequence follows the vehicle through its whole working life rather than a single trip.

Below the line that timetable in 98/A does not come into play, and the day can be built around the customer's delivery window more than around the driver's clock. It is one of the reasons fleets doing small-batch work hold on to the light van class; the constraint does not disappear, it simply moves and settles onto the registration document.

Once the numbers are laid out over a single day the arithmetic works itself out. A driver using the full 9 hours has to split them into 4.5 plus 4.5 with the 45-minute break in between, which brings the driving calendar to 9 hours 45 minutes.

Add the 11 hours of unbroken rest and 20 hours 45 minutes of the 24-hour window are already spoken for. The 3 hours 15 minutes that remain are the entire allowance for loading, unloading, queueing at the wholesale market or the depot, weighing and paperwork. In cold distribution the way that slice gets spent often decides more than the route itself, since every minute of open lid comes out of the same allowance.

Two situations deserve extra attention at the boundary. When the body is swapped or the superstructure rebuilt, the weight line on the registration document has to be updated with it. Running the same plate sometimes with customer freight and sometimes with your own goods changes nothing, because the article turns on carrying goods commercially. The line on the registration document settles which side of the threshold you are on.

The same article holds a detail aimed straight at the one-vehicle operator: where the driver is also the owner, the amounts double. For a business whose owner does the driving, one lapse carries two different price tags, and the half hour squeezed out to make up a late delivery turns into an expensive habit faster than it looks on paper.

Tare arithmetic is really a subtraction: take the maximum laden weight from the registration document, subtract the empty vehicle and every piece of trip equipment, and the number left is the product you can load. On the passive side the subtracted items are fixed and known in advance; with a mechanically refrigerated body the unit, its fuel and the insulation enter the same subtraction. When two solutions are compared, the result of that subtraction deserves as much attention as the volume on the data sheet.

Recording brings a calendar of its own. Above the line the hours no longer live only in the driver's memory. Paragraph 31 of Article 40 of the Road Transport Regulation requires digital tachograph data to be archived electronically in three-month blocks and sent to the card-issuing authority during the following month. Driving and rest hours become a filed record even when no inspector ever asks for them.

Read that paragraph in the current text instead of in older summaries: the sentence carrying the sanction was repealed by the Official Gazette of 15/5/2025, issue 32901, while the duty to archive and to send it on remains in force. Plenty of write-ups still repeat the removed sentence, so opening the consolidated file is time well spent.

In practice these sets of rules shape the route in similar ways: legs get planned under 4.5 hours, break points are chosen in advance, and the holding time of the product inside the container is checked against that timetable. A passive container makes life easier here, because a rest hour changes nothing inside it; as long as the lid stays shut the temperature curve carries on with no idea where the driver is sleeping.

For fleets that choose to stay under the line, the small-batch cold distribution page works through vehicle class, container choice and leg length together.

The hours themselves sit on the fixed side of the picture: the timetable in 98/A runs the same way on every vehicle above the line, and the 45 minutes that follow 4.5 hours of driving, along with the 11 uninterrupted hours inside 24, are counted without regard to what the body carries or how it is cooled.