Who Was Driving?

The Notice

A fine notice arrives for M-XX 1234. Offence on 14 March at 08:42 — speeding, 23 km/h over the limit after the tolerance deduction. The amount is €128.50. The envelope is stamped 2 April, and that stamp is the only date on the whole item that matters. Under driver the document says: unknown.

Both the preliminary hearing letter and the notice itself go to the registered keeper of the vehicle. For a company fleet, that is the company. The person who was actually driving is not named, and the authority does not know who it was. Finding out is your problem now, and it is a problem with two clocks on it.

Whose Clock Is Running

Three different deadlines are in play here, and they are regularly treated as one. Two of them are yours.

The authority's deadline is comfortable. Since 1 July 2026 the limitation period for prosecuting offences under § 24 (1) of the German Road Traffic Act has been a flat six months (§ 26 (3) sentence 1, as amended). It runs from the day the offence was committed (§ 31 (3) of the Act on Regulatory Offences), and the authority can interrupt it — sending out a preliminary hearing letter restarts the six months (§ 33). Waiting for it to expire is not a strategy.

Your deadline is two weeks. An objection to the notice has to reach the authority within two weeks of service (§ 67 (1) of the Act on Regulatory Offences). Service is what counts, not the date printed on the letter — the relevant date is the one stamped on the yellow envelope, which is frequently the only place it appears. For the notice above, served on 2 April, the objection has to be with the authority by 16 April. The offence itself was nineteen days earlier and has no bearing on that date.

That is the deadline that actually hurts a fleet. Fourteen calendar days, starting at a post room rather than at a desk. Inside them the notice has to be identified, routed to whoever owns it, matched against a vehicle and a driver, put to that driver, answered — and a decision taken on whether to object at all. Internal post and holiday cover can consume half of it before anyone has read the document.

Miss it and the notice becomes final. At that point it no longer matters that the registration was misread or that the vehicle was off the road that week.

And Then Fourteen More

Once the notice is final, the fine falls due, and the usual period for paying it is another two weeks. Overrun that and reminder fees and enforcement follow — a small amount turning into a larger one and into correspondence that costs more to handle than the fine itself.

Four weeks, end to end, from a letter whose arrival nobody scheduled.

Why the Driver Still Has to Be Found

None of this removes the need to establish who was driving. You cannot decide whether to object without knowing what actually happened. And two further consequences attach to a driver who is never identified — they are regularly confused with each other:

Consequences when the driver cannot be established

Costs of the proceedings	For stopping and parking offences, the keeper bears them (§ 25a of the Road Traffic Act). This does not apply to speeding.
Driver's logbook	Separately, and regardless of the type of offence, the authority may order one (§ 31a of the Road Traffic Licensing Regulations).

The first is a bill. The second is an obligation that then runs for months and touches every vehicle it covers. It is usually the more expensive of the two.

And Then There Is Abroad

International offences follow their own deadlines, and the post is slower. The notice often arrives in a language that nobody in the fleet office reads, which means it sits on a desk until somebody works out what it is. The deadline does not wait for the translation.

Five Steps by Hand

Without a system, the work looks like this:

None of these steps is difficult. All of them are interruptible, and each one is a place where the case can come to rest on somebody's desk.

Five Steps in the Model

Every step is recorded — which matters here more than in most processes, because if the logbook question ever comes up, what you need is a record of what you did and when.

What This Is Not

Reading the notice is the easy part. Software has been extracting a registration number and an amount from a scanned document for years.

The difficulty is everything after that: that a date of service on an envelope sets two clocks running, that 14 March at 08:42 has to be matched against a vehicle assignment, that the answer has to come back inside a fortnight, that somebody has to be chased when they do not reply, and that the case has to close by itself when it is finished instead of staying open in somebody's memory.

That is not a reading problem. It is a process problem — and the rules are exactly the kind that change. The limitation period itself was three months until 1 July 2026 and is six now. A rule that lives in code is a release. A rule that lives in the model is an afternoon.

How long do you need today, from the notice arriving to the driver being assigned?