Man landing on Mars or Toll-Collect delivering a working Maut system for German Autobahns? - I laughed out loud when I heard this on the radio this morning (while standing in the traffic jam caused by two centimeters of snow).

The truck Maut system was supposed to start in November 2003 but failed for various technical reasons, both hardware and software problems. The new plan of the contractor promises a stripped-down version of the system for January 2005 and the full system for January 2006. We'll see.

Currently the contract between the German government and Toll-Collect makes Toll-Collect pay 7.5 million Euro per month as long as the system isn't in place - IIRC this will go up to 15 million in April. Contrast this with the expected 180 million Euro the Maut was supposed to deliver per month.

The biggest mistake of Toll-Collect has been that they didn't admit their technical problems in time IMHO. It wasn't until September or October 2003 that they admitted that the system wouldn't be ready by November.

As Nicolai Josuttis pointed out during last week's OOP 2004, Toll-Collect is hiring people for the legal department, they probably know why. To be fair, they are also looking for some developers, engineers or project managers.

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