Telematics only tells half the story when it comes to driver behaviour

Telematics is a great tool for monitoring the location and state of a vehicle and the data captured can help to highlight risky driving behaviour. However, the data is likely to only tell you half the story. Telematics can help you to identify a risky move but it won’t help you to understand the context of the situation or the root cause of the driving behaviour.

For example, telematics will tell you when and where a driver swerved, but it will not flag if a driver was following too closely behind another vehicle or if they were using their mobile phone, for example. At the same time, telematics will not show if the driver was taking evasive action to avoid a pedestrian who ran into the road. Understanding the root cause of an incident is key to being able to accurately understand what caused it, and whether the incident was due to poor driving behaviour or taking evasive action due to a condition that arose that was outside of their control.

All too often fleet managers are inundated with raw data without the tools needed to identify, prioritise and, ultimately, prevent risk.

Creating effective driver safety improvement programmes through telematics alone is not possible. Telematics has to be combined with additional data sources such as video and it needs someone who is able to review the information captured and correctly interpret it. It’s simply not feasible to make positive changes to driver behaviour in a meaningful, long-term way without knowing what actually happened.

Here are a few of the key questions that fleet managers should be asking themselves:

Does the vehicle data we capture now tell us the full story?

Is the data good enough to show what’s happening in our fleet?

Do we have sufficient resources to sift through all of the vehicle data to identify risky driving incidents and driver compliance with our policies?

If you can answer yes to all of the above then you should be seeing a reduction in collisions, reduced vehicle maintenance costs and lower fuel consumption. If you weren’t able to answer yes to those questions then chances are you’re not getting the full story of what’s going on inside your fleet. The good news is that technology is rapidly evolving that will help you gain valuable insights into the inner workings of your fleet. These new technologies can help you proactively identify and manage fleet risk.