Last Thursday, on September 27, a part of our team attended the annual Telematics Conference CEEurope in Warsaw, Poland. This year the conference was focusing on the topic of telematics industry collaborations, and we were lucky to be among the event partners and host an interactive session on the issue of co-opetition possibilities in telematics. Continue reading “Mapon showcases company solutions and expertise in the annual Telematics Conference in Warsaw”
If your company provides remote digital tachograph data download services to other businesses, you know the struggle of keeping all the tachograph cards organised and available at all times. Storing smart cards at clients’ offices and ensuring their availability 24/7 can be a mess. Similarly, hosting tens or hundreds of cards in your office can easily turn into a cable and card reader chaos. Luckily, there is a solution to avoid such situations – a stand alone tachograph remote download card hotel, or, as we call it, the Tacho Hotel. Continue reading “Tacho Hotel – a stand alone solution for hosting multiple tachograph cards”
Manual counting of every employee’s work and private routes takes up a lot of time and may cause unnecessary expenses for the company. To help our partners and clients avoid such risks, we’ve introduced a new feature, the Driving Log, to our system. The solution allows you to set private and work routes as well as choose a time frame for routing purposes for the whole week, enabling automatic change of the route type and saving many hours spent on reporting every month. Continue reading “Driving Log – a new, convenient solution to route logging”
It might seem so simple: deciding who in your business can use a vehicle and who can’t. However, when schedules clash and overlap, and seemingly all the cars are taken at once or one specific vehicle gets used more than the others, it suddenly stops being so simple.
For this reason, Mapon has developed the Vehicle Booking solution for our system.
It is extremely easy to use, yet very beneficial for a business, beyond its seemingly basic purpose. So what are the benefits of Vehicle Booking?
When talking about GPS tracking, most people think about vehicle tracking. In fact, there are quite a lot of applications for GPS tracking in other industries. Let’s go through a few of them in order to get a full picture of the solutions we can provide.
To keep your vehicle running well and efficiently, you need to give it an overall check on a regular basis. On average it is advised to do a thorough check on your vehicle every 1000 km or so. Letting an issue go unchecked or unfound for too long can result in growing expenses for repairs or even put your driver and other members of the traffic at risk. For this reason, Mapon has created a tool that allows you to go through all the necessary tests for your vehicle in our mobile Mapon Driver app – Vehicle Inspections.
We are proud to announce that 2017 has been a year of great progress and gains for us.
Through dedication and hard work we have increased the number of our clients, partners and installed devices, as well as opened a new branch in Spain. There’s more:
Driving across Europe means dealing with a patchwork of toll systems, rules, and payment methods. From the congested streets of major cities to transnational motorways, road tolls are unavoidable, especially for fleet operators. Moreover, France road tolls differ considerably from toll charges in Switzerland, making the situation even more complicated.
This guide covers how toll charges work in key European countries and how Mapon can help you manage payments more efficiently.
What are toll roads, and how do they work?
Toll systems in Europe fall into three main categories:
1. Toll Roads and Toll Lanes
These are typically highways, bridges, or tunnels. You pay to use a specific road or lane, often via toll booths or electronic gantries. Classic examples include the Tunnel du Fréjus (connecting France and Italy) and Germany’s Herrentunnel.
2. Urban Road Pricing
This is common in major cities like London, Stockholm, or Oslo. Vehicles are charged for entering or driving within specific zones, mainly to reduce traffic and pollution.
3. Network-Based Road Pricing
This model charges vehicles across national motorway networks. Such pricing may only be heavy vehicles (e.g. Switzerland LSVA, German LKW-Maut), or all vehicles (e.g. electronic vignettes in Hungary). It may be only on motorways (e.g. Austrian ASFINAG tolls) or on all roads (e.g. New Zealand Road User Charges).
Systems vary widely: some target only heavy goods vehicles, others apply to all. Austria road tolls, for instance, are enforced through electronic vignettes for all vehicles, while Germany road tolls apply to lorries via GPS tracking.
Comparing Toll Charges in Europe
If you’re planning multi-country routes, here’s what you should expect in terms of European toll roads.
Toll roads in Europe serve more than just revenue collection. They exist to address key infrastructure and environmental concerns that affect national and cross-border transportation networks.
The main reasons for implementing toll charges in Europe are:
To fund road construction and maintenance: Many European toll roads operate on a user-pays principle, where drivers help cover the cost of building and maintaining highways, bridges, and tunnels.
To reduce traffic congestion: In busy urban zones or cross-border routes, toll pricing is used to manage vehicle flow and limit congestion, especially during peak hours.
To lower pollution levels: Some toll systems, particularly urban toll zones in Europe, aim to decrease emissions by discouraging unnecessary trips through cities or by charging more for older, high-emission vehicles.
How does Europe collect toll charges?
When it comes to paying toll charges in France, Germany, Italy, or anywhere else in Europe, the collection methods vary by country but typically fall into three models:
Open system: Charges are applied at fixed points such as mainline barrier toll plazas, commonly seen on French road tolls and in Spain.
Closed system: Drivers take a ticket upon entry and pay upon exit based on the distance traveled. This is typical on many Italian toll roads.
Open road tolling: No toll booths. Instead, electronic toll gantries record vehicles as they pass. This method is growing across toll roads in Europe, especially in Portugal, Austria, and Hungary, where systems like HU-GO are fully digital.
France Road Tolls: What You Need to Know
France has one of the most extensive and well-maintained toll networks in Europe. French road tolls are charged primarily on motorways operated by private concessionaires. Charges vary depending on the route, vehicle type, and even time of day.
There are several methods to handle French road toll payment:
At toll booths (cash or card)
Electronic badges (Télépéage)
Prepaid cards
Mobile apps
If you’re planning ahead, use a France road toll calculator to estimate costs for different routes.
Popular tools include:
Autoroutes.fr
ViaMichelin
Mappy
Searches like “France road tolls calculator” or “France road tolls pay online” bring up several tools you can use to forecast costs.
HU-GO: A Closer Look at Hungary’s Toll System
Hungary operates a distance-based electronic toll system called HU-GO, applicable to vehicles over 3.5 tonnes. It’s one of the more advanced systems in Central Europe, using GPS data to track vehicle movements and calculate charges.
Mapon offers full integration with the HU-GO toll system, streamlining toll management for both drivers and fleet operators. Instead of buying route tickets manually or worrying about inaccurate declarations, your vehicles automatically send location data to the HU-GO platform.
Benefits for Fleet Operators
Save time on administration: No need for drivers to stop at fuel stations or manually enter trip details.
Avoid penalties: Automated toll payment helps prevent fines from missed or incorrect declarations.
Ensure regulatory compliance: The system meets Hungarian toll regulations, simplifying operations and reducing oversight.
How It Works
Setup requirements: You’ll need a Mapon account with GPS tracking enabled and an active HU-GO account.
Select vehicles: Choose which vehicles should transmit real-time location data from the Mapon platform to HU-GO.
Automatic toll calculation: HU-GO uses the geolocation data from Mapon to calculate toll charges in Hungary and process payments accordingly.
This setup is particularly useful for fleets operating across multiple European toll roads, where manual processes can become error-prone and time-consuming. As digital tolling expands across Europe, having systems like Mapon in place helps future-proof your operations.
Once connected, toll fees are deducted from your e-TOLL wallet based on actual road usage. You can manage which vehicles are active, enable or disable data forwarding, and receive alerts if anything goes wrong, helping you stay compliant and avoid penalties on Polish toll roads without manual effort.
*** Toll roads in Europe aren’t going away. If anything, more countries are digitising and expanding toll networks.
With Mapon’s toll system integrations and GPS tracking, you can reduce costs, avoid fines, and keep your fleet moving smoothly across borders.
Looking to simplify toll payments and avoid errors? Contact our team, and we will get
It’s the harsh reality of any business that perfection is unattainable.
However!
One should always strive towards it. That’s why we’re currently hard at work on a new Driver Behaviour solution for our Mapon system users.
With it, you’ll know EXACTLY who’s the most economical, the most ecological and the most efficient of your drivers. And, more importantly, you will know the ones who need to improve: their performance growth will inevitably lead to your business growing as well!
Eight new prospective Tachogram partners, future Aplicom device integration into our Mapon platform and a new, Slovakia based distributor for Mapon are just a few of Mapon’s and Tachogam’s success stories from Telematics Conference SEEurope – the only telematics conference in Southeast Europe.
It took place on the 28th of September in Bratislava where Mapon and Tachogram were amongst the 15 international exhibitors to showcase their telematics solutions – alongside such names as Google Maps, TomTom, Gurtam and Teltonika.
