• Dashcams provide video clips of adverse driving events, allowing a carrier to identify the riskiest drivers, provide evidence of a crash, and allow improvement in the safety culture of the carrier.
• A carrier’s failure to install dashcams in its vehicles may be considered falling short of best industry practices.

In a typical fleet, 15 to 20 percent of the drivers represent 80 percent of the risk. Dashcams, also known as video-event recorders, usually capture 10 to 20 second video clips when an event is detected by the accelerometer or artificial intelligence in the camera(s) mounted in or on a vehicle. These cameras can help identify and focus on the riskiest drivers, provide evidence in the event of a crash, and allow proactive transformation of the carrier’s safety culture.

Driver investment

Investing in proactive performance management processes can allow a company to grow, instead of tread water. The cost to replace a fully-trained driver exceeds $10,000 in many companies when considering the lost productivity, training, and sign-on bonuses of newly-recruited drivers. The scarcity of willing, qualified drivers makes it more imperative to build a safety program that can sustain a business — and that means sustaining drivers — well into the future.

Best practice

Video-event systems provide unsafe behavior detection BEFORE crashes and citations occur. However, a carrier will need to act on the data consistently and in accordance with a progressive-discipline policy. Eventually, carriers may be expected to have video-event systems in each truck to show due diligence. As industry best practices evolve, carriers that don’t have video may be found to be falling short.

Safety enhancement

Video event systems are a wise investment whether a carrier is looking to enhance an already solid safety program or to greatly improve safety processes. What’s more, proactively eliminating unsafe behaviors can be a culture-shifting moment for safety programs and can provide a competitive advantage.