Driving up safety with video telematics
David Savage, vice president, UK & Ireland at Geotab, explains how the latest technology is helping to reduce risky driving
Every 16 minutes someone is killed or seriously injured on a road in the UK. Each is a preventable tragedy – and whilst the UK is amongst the safest across 32 European countries, one incident is too many.
Businesses across the United Kingdom operate fleets comprising some 20 million vehicles on Britain’s roads—and about 40,000 people are injured in work-related driving incidents each year.
According to Brake, the road safety charity, the chances of being involved specifically in a work-related driving crash are as high as 1 in 500. That’s why it’s no surprise that Britain’s businesses are continuing to prioritise fleet safety as part of their operational objectives.
Geotab recently polled UK fleet managers to understand their top fleet priorities for the coming year – and safety was cited as a leading focus area.
For this reason, many of Britain’s fleet managers are turning to telematics as a way to enhance driver safety. One key aspect of this endeavour is video telematics, which leverages onboard vehicle cameras to minimise risky driving behaviours through proactive incident prevention.
Geotab has enhanced its telematics capabilities by directly integrating Lytx’s Surfsight camera – a pioneer and global leader in video telematics – into the Geotab Marketplace and MyGeotab platform.
This brings Lytx’s advanced machine vision (MV) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to the fore. It provides Geotab users with AI-driven insights and video data, enhancing their understanding of driver behaviours and delivering instant alerts for harsh driving incidents, all seamlessly within Geotab’s ecosystem.
Lytx camera solutions capture 3 billion miles of driving data each month, and around 364,000 risky driving events each day, which results in a driving database that has the depth and quality needed for unrivalled accuracy.
Through this powerful analysis, Lytx cameras can identify instances of sudden acceleration, sharp turns, harsh braking, and driver distraction – and mitigate them accordingly with audible alerts and warnings in-cab to let drivers self-correct before video capture is triggered. Insights captured from vehicles within the fleet can also be used for driver coaching and preventative initiatives, to encourage positive behaviours and safer manoeuvres en route.
One such fleet that leveraged such a solution amongst its fleet of courier vans managed to enhance driver safety to such an extent that it was able to empower its drivers to change risky behaviours in the moment, improve driver retention due to fewer incidents and injuries, enhance vehicle uptime due to a reduction in off-road repairs, and ultimately yield insurance premium savings of £2,000 per vehicle.
Similarly, Dipesa Group in Ibiza—operating a fleet of 88 vehicles supporting the 3 million tourists visiting the island each year—faced a challenge in tracking road incidents, reviewing positive driving practices, and providing drivers with additional safety and protection in an efficient way.
As a result, it turned to a video telematics solution from Lytx and Geotab leveraging the Surfsight AI-12.
Since deployment, it now has a near-real-time log of driver performance, a workforce that is more confident and responding positively to feeling safer and more supported, and an overall reduction of traffic incidents by 10 per cent – more surprisingly, it even attained an immediate 20 per cent reduction in fuel consumption simply through more responsible driving, reducing harmful carbon emissions by up to 132 tonnes annually.
Through solutions such as these, businesses are successfully promoting safety throughout all aspects of their respective organisations: from ensuring assessment and control of risks, to establishing policies, and compliance monitoring.
By understanding these responsibilities and working collaboratively, businesses can observe benefits such as lower driver risk, fewer crashes attributed to the business, and reduced operational costs.
This past year, Geotab was ranked the number one leader in commercial video telematics recognising its commitment to innovation and high-quality, actionable data for fleet safety – and together with Lytx, recently won the Fleet Safety Product category at the Brake UK Fleet Champions Awards.
Geotab’s powerful fleet safety telematics platform, which seamlessly integrates with the industry’s leading third-party solutions, ensures safety is always at the forefront of the fleet – and is easy to manage in one place. With all of these tools, fleets can leverage the wealth of data available to them, drawing powerful insights and intelligence to make a world where safer roads are a reality for us all.
