Hi Chris,

Is your transponder named Autopass? If so, they are developed and made in Norway. An old class mate of mine was one of the inventors.

In Norway we have a lot of toll roads, many people have an Autopass transponder. We have the option of paying different amounts in advantage, and with the transponder we can drive through any Autopass toll station and the toll fee is deducted from the advance payments. When less that 25% of the advance payment is left, we are warned by a white light, and a new invoice is sent automatically. One advance payment can be shared between two transponders.

Without the transponder we can at some toll station pay in cash, but some places we can just drive through. The car is photographed by an electronic camera, an OCR program processes the image and read the car's registration number, and an invoice is sent to the car owner. If the car only passes one or twice over a period of one month, typically a tourist, no invoice is sent. And the system runs without any problems whatsoever.


>>>Al,
>>>
>>>I don't feel like spending $3 to read the article, care to give a synopsis of it?
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>>Ahh, sorry, I'm a subscriber, I thought it was a freely available article... I guess not.
>>
>>The German government entered into a PPP to develop a system to automatically charge road tolls to truckers, using satellite-positioning and mobile telephony technologies. The partnership coalition includes DaimlerChrysler, Deutsche Telekom and CofiRoute of France.
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>>Problems that are mostly software-related have greatly delayed implementation of this system. They include such things as showing trucks as being on roadways when they are merely near them, and draining truck batteries when the truck is not running.
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>Sounds like they tried to solve a simple problem with a complex solution, the tollways in australia have electronic readers and you just stick a little transponder to your windscreen and it beeps as you drive through the toll plaza at 90Km/h - Trucks can use the same technology - Why would the german government try to use satelites to solve a problem that a $30 piece of electronics seems to do a good job with. In fact I am pretty sure that the reader on my car is made in Germany (the company who makes them at least - they are probably made in china), so surely the technology is available in germany and the rest of europe?