Germany's transport ministry is in talks with Italy's main toll-road operator to sort out the troubled German motorway truck-tolling programme

Autostrade, which also operates road-tolling technology in Austria, the UK and the US, has offered to introduce its simpler road-tolling technology to replace Germany's satellite-tracking system, which has so far failed to work. Antonio Marano, director of corporate development for Autostrade, told the Financial Times his company had talked to the Ministry of Transport and to Toll Collect about scrapping introducing a technology that Autostrade has used for a truck-tolling scheme on Austria's motorways. Toll Collect - a consortium of Deutsche Telekom, an arm of carmaker DaimlerChrysler, and Cofiroute, the French toll-road operator - was meant to introduce a charging scheme for trucks on Germany's motorways at the end of August 2003. But technical problems forced it to postpone the start of full operations until the end of 2005, with a less sophisticated version to come in by the end of this year. The Federal Transport Ministry has said the delay is costing it €156m ($198m) a month. According to reports, Toll Collect is paying the ministry compensation of only €250,000 a day. Autostrade's Austrian scheme, which features microwave transmitters that detect electronic tags on board trucks, was introduced on time at the start of this year on 2,000km of Austria's motorways.