Driver-Focused Fleet Management and Road Safety Insights

By: Jonathan Matus, Zendrive, CEO & Co-Founder

Knowledge is power. And in 2018, knowledge means data, and the technology to find trends, tendencies, and actionable insights from it can save lives and lower costs.

A Clearer, More Complete Picture of Your Fleets
To prevent collisions and save lives and money, fleet managers need a clear window into their drivers’ performance. It’s not enough to track vehicle movements; you need to understand your drivers’ behavior. In the Vision Zero era, preventing crashes means fixing the behaviors that are most likely to lead to them.

Smartphone-based telematics technology measures driver behavior. Using the sensors already available in your smartphones, a variety of safety elements like speeding, hard braking, sharp acceleration, length of time behind the wheel, time of day, and – yes – even phone use can be measured. Ninety percent of collisions result from human error, and 30 percent of those result from phone use.

Using smartphone sensors helps understand what really matters: the people. Take, for example, Booster Fuels, a fleet that has many drivers who operate multiple vehicles. A smartphone-based system that stays with drivers allows managers and others to understand where and when risky behavior behind the wheel occurs and how to work with drivers to improve it.

A More Accurate Picture of Your Drivers
Not only is it more useful, it’s more accurate.

A recent study by the University of Illinois concluded that smartphone-based systems like Zendrive are as accurate or more accurate than on-board devices (OBD) in measuring 13 of 14 driving behaviors, including several that OBDs cannot measure at all (like phone usage and speed versus posted limits).

Zendrive has collected over 100 billion miles of driver data to date – more than anyone else in the industry combined – and we’re gathering an additional 10 billion miles every single month.

Track24 partnered with Zendrive for just this reason. Track24 planned to scale their app to help protect all drivers and passengers for almost all journeys in all vehicles, but on-board impact detection hardware and software had become prone to false alarms and relied on less detailed algorithmic solutions. Zendrive integrated collision response into the Track24 app, and now trip analytics and scoring capabilities help their drivers and passengers around the world stay safer while driving.

Driver Coaching
For fleet managers, data is good. But results are better. That’s why machine-learning algorithms like Zendrive’s are being used to turn sensor data into actionable coaching insights for drivers. In-app feedback and progress reports about everything from speed control to phone use provide both drivers and managers a full picture, and coaching makes drivers safer.

And, it works. We looked at 21,000 drivers from eight of our customers’ fleets to understand how data analytics and coaching affect safety. Fleets using Zendrive saw a sustained safety improvement of 11.4-percent in their riskiest drivers. This reduced the likelihood of these drivers getting in a collision by 49-percent, which translates into up to $2,000 in savings per risky driver per year. Improved driver behavior reduces the probability of collisions and lowers insurance and other expenses.

Conclusion
Fast Company recently named Zendrive one of its 10 Most Innovative Companies for 2018, and the reason is simple: we aim to save lives.

We do that by making fleets and their drivers smarter, safer, and better informed.

By doing that, we lower the likelihood of fleet drivers getting into crashes, saving their companies significant money on operations, lawsuits, and insurance.

Well, that’s just icing on the cake.

If you’d like to learn more, send us a note!