Tachographs are used in most heavy vehicles in Europe to control drivers’ hours, and for secondary purposes ranging from accident investigation and environmental enforcement to the prevention of fraud. Their effectiveness is under threat from increasing levels of sophisticated fraud and manipulation. We examine this in the context of recent EU proposals to move to smartcard-based tachograph systems, which are aimed at cutting fraud and improving the level of enforcement generally. We conclude that the proposed new regime will be extremely vulnerable to the wholesale forgery of smartcards and to system-level manipulation, which in turn could lead to a large-scale breakdown in control. We present this as an interesting and important problem to the security community.