The State of Fleet Safety

According to the NHTSA, commercial fleets incur $11B in crash related costs every year, and the median nuclear verdict judgements have risen to $20 Million. 42% of commercial vehicle side collissions are fatal. Fleet managers are under immense pressure to navigate the complexities of safety, compliance, and operational efficiency. The persistent issues of risky driving behaviors, inexperienced drivers, rising crash and litigation costs, regulatory hurdles, and high insurance premiums paint a challenging landscape.

The absence of real-time monitoring and feedback further complicates efforts to correct driver behavior and retention. Addressing these multifaceted problems requires innovative solutions that go beyond the capabilities of traditional coaching methods, requiring a comprehensive approach to fleet safety.

Driver Coaching: A Solution

Driver coaching is a transformative solution aimed at enhancing public safety for all road users by significantly improving driving behavior and reducing associated risks. At its core, driver coaching is a 3 step process: 

1. Identify: Identifying risky behavior by the driver accurately. 

2. Quantify: Quantifying the risky behavior displayed, either through an internal fleet criteria or based on best practices and severity. 

3. Rectify: Providing targeted feedback and training to drivers, helping them to understand and rectify their mistakes in real time, as well as in the back office.
   

Encouraging a culture of safety within the fleet is a critical aspect of driver coaching. When drivers feel supported and valued, their commitment to safe driving practices increases, which positively impacts the overall safety performance of the fleet. Additionally, driver coaching helps in cut operational overhead and ensure regulatory compliance by as drivers adhere to the necessary legal and safety standards.

Challenges With Driver Coaching

While driver coaching makes sense on paper, the current market offerings so far have been lackluster. No safety and fleet management vendor today provides world class service in any of the 3 core pillars of coaching.

Solutions are plagued with inaccurate AI which makes detection a hassle, more importantly, false positive events generate in cab alerts that are also incorrect. This creates distrust between the driver and the technology that’s supposed to keep them safe. This constant erosion of trust eventually ends up in the driver not believing in any of the risky behavior or the in cab alerts that the AI detects and fires.

Furthermore, issues with inaccurate AI consequently trickle down to back office operations. Current fleet safety solutions have basic data analytics capabilities. Actionable insights provided by these vendors are far and few, and not enough to make any meaningful conclusions by safety managers. This not only causes a lack of trust in the technology in the back office as well, but also dangerously steers safety managers to make the wrong decisions based on the wrong data. This incorrect incident analysis caused due to subpar services increases tension between the driver and safety manager. 

Even if a safety manager analyzes the event correctly, and chooses to take the right corrective action, documenting a trail of it is still a big challenge. Rudimentary process flows plague the safety solution industry. Solutions range from providing no coaching workflows at all, to providing a version that’s bare bones. For those that do provide coaching workflows, there’s a severe lack of any tracking metric that drivers can be evaluated based off of. 

Another issue is the lack of documented evidence in case of litigation or driver exoneration. Current offerings in the market provide abysmal video recall capabilities, often capped to a month at maximum. 

Smarter AI Driver Coaching

Smarter AI Driver Coaching redefines coaching and fleet management with a suite of advanced features designed to optimize safety, efficiency, and driver performance.

High Precision Detection

• Double 9s of precision ensure that every event that’s generated and every alert that fires off has industry leading accuracy.

• Custom modifiable in cab alerts on edge; with selectable text, voice, and regional accents to make sure you get the message across. 

• Auto Coaching with in cab alerts to reduce load at the back office.

• AI powered predictive analytics to proactively understand who to incentivize and who to give more attention to.

World Class Insights

• In depth event analysis with vehicle dynamics, telematics, sensor fusion, and AI inferencing metadata. Go as deep as you’d like, or let Smarter AI handle it by providing a proprietary Magnitude score denoting the severity of the event. 

• Choose to view what you want, and what you don’t by filtering with magnitude, score, and cameras.

• Investigate frame by frame with FramePeek, which gives you frame level granularity to get to the bottom of things; fast.

• Take a high level look at your fleet score. Or go in depth by filtering with personas, driving habits, aggressiveness, and more.

• Mark an event as coachable, or group it with others for a deeper coaching session later on.

Documented Trail of Evidence

• Keep a detailed track of who was coached, what their score was, and what their score is post coaching. 

• Go back in time for up to 90 days to pull recorded footage from the camera in case of litigation or driver exoneration.

• Sort by habitual risky drivers, or drivers who’ve improved the most and need to be incentivized.

• Add notes to your coaching session or event. Circle back and provide proof.

The Benefits: Streamlined Operations and Better Bottom Line

The Smarter AI Driver Platform & Coaching deliver measurable benefits that transform fleet operations and driver performance.

Data Driven Decisions

• Industry leading AI accuracy to auto coach drivers and pinpoint the root cause.

• Detailed event insights to figure out the Who, what, where, when, why, and how.

• Live Visibility into fleet operations to keep a track of all your assets and drivers.

• Documented trail of evidence to circle back to and provide proof.

• Coaching history to keep drivers accountable.

• Fleet and driver score to keep a track of overall safety performance.

Optimized Costs & Risk Avoidance

• Hassle free exoneration with documented proof of innocence.

• 90 day video recall to pull out any video and data required.

• Cheaper insurance premiums with a safer fleet of drivers.

• Increased driver retention due to best coaching practices and a good safety culture.

Greater Fleet Performance

• Realtime in cab alerts to nudge and correct driver behavior on the spot.

• Custom coaching programs to tackle every driver’s specific need individually.

• Score tracking to introduce healthy competition between drivers.

Sustainability

• Efficient driving practices for safer roads.

• Idle time reduction for a lower carbon footprint.

• Route optimization to reduce fuel consumption.

Trusted Security

• GDPR, PIPEDA, SOC2 compliance for peace of mind.

• Military grade data encryption in transit and at rest.

• Cloud storage in your country of choice.